Schlesinger was born in New Jersey in 1934. She was an undergraduate at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, graduating in 1956 with a degree in chemistry; she remained at the same institution for doctoral work and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1960. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Italy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1][2]