Nina is the Director of TB & HIV Prevention in the global health program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She is responsible for the foundation’s HIV and TB vaccine programs, as well as the HIV biologics and small molecule prevention programs. Nina also supports non-vaccine HIV prevention and immunotherapeutic programs, as well as SARS-CoV-2 vaccine efforts, in collaboration with other foundation teams in Global Health. In addition, Nina founded and leads the Gates Foundation’s Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD), a large network of HIV vaccine discovery and development projects.  She co-leads, with the NIH, the Pox-Protein Public Private Partnership (P5) and advises the NIH as a longstanding member of the AIDS Vaccine Research Subcommittee and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Vaccine Research Center.

Prior to joining the Gates Foundation in 2005, Nina worked in academic research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington. Her early research focused on cellular immunology with an emphasis on the development and validation of immunological assays for human vaccine trials. She subsequently moved into early stage HIV vaccine clinical trials as part of the NIH-funded HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), where she worked with numerous industry and academic partners to advance novel HIV vaccine candidates into early phase clinical testing.

Nina received a B.A from Yale University and her M.D. from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and a clinical and research fellowship in Infectious Diseases at the Montefiore Medical Center – Albert Einstein College of Medicine.