Nina Plonka, born in 1981, is a specialist in online research and documents and record analysis. She has worked for stern magazine since the formation of the investigative unit. Plonka extensively covered international football match-fixing, as well as international tax fraud and grand scale art forgery.

Plonka completed a journalism traineeship at Deutsche Welle Radio and Television in 2010. She had previously studied Communication in the German city of Gelsenkirchen and in Wales, Great Britain. She also holds a “Master of Journalism” from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

During her Deutsche Welle traineeship she interned at „ProPublica“ in New York, the first international non-profit news room for investigative journalism.

The Journalism Education Association of Australia awarded her for a feature on people who live with anxiety disorders.

The stories on football match-fixing "2 International Matches + 7 Penalty Kicks = Millions for the Mafia" and  "The Syndicate" were shortlisted for the most prestigious German journalism award in 2012, the Henri Nannen Preis.