Prior to VRG, she was a researcher at Samsung Research America.. She completed postdoctoral studies in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2011. Nina works on developing efficient search algorithms for decision and optimization problems. She was named one of "AI's 10 to Watch" young researchers in the field of AI. She also received an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2011 and an outstanding program committee member award at the Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2012.