A Los Angeles native, Nina developed a passion for social equity and creating nonviolent, healthy communities through her background and upbringing as a Korean-Japanese American. Her diverse experiences have broadened her view of health and wellbeing: volunteering at domestic violence shelters, counseling survivors as a certified Sexual Assault Response Team advocate, helping address the maternal transmission of Hepatitis B, and becoming a published author with a Caltech professor on novel research related to curing HIV. As a Global Health master’s student, she has researched the impacts of environmental racism and injustice on the health of marginalized communities in Mississippi and North Carolina, and recently joined a project on the mental health impacts of inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene access on unhoused individuals in Tijuana and San Diego. In honor of her grandmother, she has been working at the Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute designing a campaign to increase the participation of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials, who are disproportionately impacted, yet severely underrepresented in Alzheimer’s research.