Hauptfuhrer is a retired lawyer and Duke University graduate. After finishing the University of Virginia Law School, she clerked for the late Collins J. Seitz, chief judge of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. She worked for Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, N.Y., the Legal Aid Society of New York, and Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, the Charlotte firm founded by her father, Russell M. Robinson II, a former board chair of the Endowment. She is a noted civic and community leader, having served as board chair for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Community Foundation, the Levine Museum of the New South, Discovery Place Science Museum and MDC Inc., a Durham, N.C., based think-tank devoted to promoting equitable change in the South.