By background, Nino Makhashvili is a psychiatrist and over the years have worked in in-patient and outpatient mental health services in Georgia. Nowadays, she serves as a head of the Mental Health Center at Ilia State University in Tbilisi,  having positions also as a director of the multidisciplinary MA program in Mental Health and a co-director of the Ph.D. program in Public Health. Her research interests include the mental health needs of war-affected populations, systems of mental healthcare, and human rights in mental health.

Nino is also a director of the non-profit foundation “Global Initiative on Psychiatry-Tbilisi” (GIP-T), a member organization of the Federation GIP.

Together with a team, she works to advance mental healthcare in Georgia and other countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, etc.

GIP-T is supporting deinstitutionalization processes, and community-based care development, and is lobbying for rights-based mental healthcare.