Nadine Wagener studied media studies and English literature/culture in her Bachelor's at the University of Paderborn and then completed her Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Media Studies at the University of Bielefeld. She then earned her doctorate in human-computer interaction (HCI) at the University of Bremen with a thesis on “Virtual reality applications for self-care and well-being.” As a postdoc, she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, where she researched multimodality and agency, and was a visiting researcher at Cornell Tech, New York, where she collaborated on projects at the interface of AI, collaboration, and healthcare. Since October 2025, she has been group leader of the Personal Pervasive Computing (PPC) group at OFFIS.

Her research interests lie particularly in the areas of technologies for health and well-being, productivity in the workplace, AI for recognizing patterns and trends in problematic smartphone use, FemTech, VR/AR for emotion regulation, and pervasive technologies for self-tracking.