Nina Pavlin-Bernardić graduated psychology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 2003 and received her PhD degree in 2010 (the theme of her dissertation was "Mathematical problem solving strategies: testing children’s strategy choices and discoveries model"). In 2004 she started working at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, as a junior research assistant. She became a senior research assistant in 2010, and in 2012 she became an assistant professor, employed at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and at the Centre for Croatian Studies in Zagreb. From 2019 she is employed full time at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and in 2020 she became an associate professor. Her field is educational psychology.
She participated in several scientific projects and she was a research group leader in the area of motivational aspects of STEM. She was the leader of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences' team on the multidisciplinary project "ICT Competence Network for Innovative Services for Persons with Complex Communication Needs" (ICT-AAC, 2013-2015), which was partly funded by the European Union. She is an associate on the multidisciplinary project Q-MERSIVE: Modeling and Monitoring QoE for Immersive 5G-Enabled Multimedia Services, financed by the Croatian Science Foundation.
She has completed several additional educations and trainings in the area of educational psychology and methodology of teaching psychology (e.g. "Active learning and critical thinking in higher education", "Quality assurance and evaluation in teaching", "Innovative and creative perspectives: new directions in educational research"), as well as in statistical analyses of data and computer programming.
She was a mentor of more than forty graduate theses and two doctoral dissertations. As a member of program and organizing committee she has participated in the organization of several international and domestic conferences. She is a member of the European Association for Learning and Instruction, Croatian Psychological Association and Croatian Psychological Chamber.