Nina was four and a half years into her fellowship at NIH in January 2025 when HHS implemented a communications freeze. She was studying how networks in the brain could change to support our flexible understanding of the world when suddenly she could no longer communicate with her colleagues or order critical experimental equipment. After receiving a threatening government wide email asking staff to out their “DEI” colleagues, Nina realized that she could not wait for someone else to act.

First she advocated independently, using her first amendment rights to blowing the whistle through news media and social media. After portraits of diverse NIH community members around campus were removed, she reposted printouts of the images. Then she found other NIH staff risking their livelihoods to fight for scientific freedom and a just government. She worked collectively for a larger impact, leading off-duty NIH staff in visits Congress, organizing a walkout of NIH Director Bhattacharya’s town hall, and when NIH canceled Take Your Kid to Work Day due to diminished staffing, she worked with a group to organize (Not) NIH Take Your Family to Work Day. She launched “Save Health Research” to support a community of anonymous NIH community members as they shared stories and information about how to advocate for a depoliticized NIH and is an organizing force behind connecting similar social media projects across the “alt government” accounts.

These early 2025 efforts culminated in the Bethesda Declaration, the NIH staff letter of dissent that led a movement of similar letters across the federal civil service. She worked with other NIH community members to share what they learned by organizing the Bethesda Declaration so future letter organizers could make increasingly larger impacts.

Since September 2026, she has turned her advocacy into a career, coming on as co-director of 27 UNIHTED. She brings her personal experience of using fundamental (“basic”) research to improve health and the world and her passion for bringing together unlikely collaborators to make a difference.