Professor Coffman is the Director (Head of Department) of BSSC (formerly BSCPM) and the Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at the Bartlett. She is Editor-in-Chief and Coordinating Editor of Elsevier's Structural Change and Economic Dynamics and on the honorary editorial boards of The Journal of Cleaner Production, Economia Politica, and the editorial boards of Frontiers of Engineering Management and the Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment. She is a Fellow of Goodenough College, where several of the school's doctoral students are residential members. 

In December 2021, Professor Coffman was elected Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Milan (Statale), a Guest Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Professor of Renmin University of China. 

Before coming to UCL in 2014, she spent six years as a fellow of Newnham College where she variously held a junior research fellowship (Mary Bateson Research Fellowship), a post as a college lecturer and teaching fellow, and a Leverhulme ECF. In July 2009, she started the Centre for Financial History, which she directed through December 2014. It is still going strong, but has moved from Newnham College to Darwin College in line with the affiliation of its new director.

Professor Coffman did her undergraduate training at the Wharton School in managerial and financial economics and my PhD in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, her doctoral research in the UK was funded in part by the Mellon Foundation under the guise of an IHR pre-doctoral fellowship and an SSRC international dissertation fellowship. She holds both American and British citizenship, and lives in London with her husband, a consultant physician in intensive care medicine and clinical reader in critical care nephrology, and young son.