Nina Finley's work is grounded in the principle of interbeing, defined by Thich Nhat Hanh as "the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else." Interbeing stretches beyond the human to include our multispecies kin: the plants, animals, microbes, rivers, and soil that make up our extended bodies. As a disease ecologist, Nina has worked alongside microbial and human communities in the Salish Sea, Ecuador, Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Scotland, and Nunavut. Everywhere, she encountered eerily similar stories about how colonialism is the root driver of extinction and injustice.

Since 2018, Nina has worked with the non-profit organization Health In Harmony. The organization's mission is to listen to rainforest communities and invest precisely in their solutions to protect forests. Interventions range from livelihood and education programs to mobile health clinics. Underlying the success of these interventions is a commitment to Indigenous self-determination. Nina's role as the Health In Harmony researcher manager is not to design interventions, but to evalute their impact and translate community expertise into the language of peer-reviewed science. Her recent study on wildlife returning to a community-reforested parcel in Indonesian Borneo was featured in The New York Times.

Nina's creative non-fiction writing has appeared in Edge Effects and Camas: Nature of the West. Her science journalism is published in Mongabay and Icarus Complex. Her sketch-note art has been commissioned by the Emergence Podcast, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Nina is currenlty a OneZoo-funded PhD student in infectious and tropical diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she is a member of the Environmental Health Group in the Department of Disease Control with Dr. Laura Braun. She is jointly based at the Natural History Museum with Dr. Aidan Emery. Nina is working alongside rice farmers of Madagascar’s Manombo Rainforest to test solutions for living well with schistosomes, freshwater parasites that move between snail and human hosts and cause disease in 250 million people.