Beginning as an apprentice trainer in 1988, Nana continued her education and in 1998 she had the opportunity of a lifetime training over 300 hours with Marian Breland Bailey & Bob Bailey who were groundbreakers in the application of operant conditioning.

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A bit of history: The science of operant conditioning in professional animal training is more than sixty years old. The scientific study of operant conditioning began at the turn of the twenty century with Edward L. Thorndike and C. Lloyd Morgan to B. F. Skinner in the 1930's and in 1941, then Marian Breland and her first husband Keller Breland became Skinner's graduate students. Marian and Keller took it out of the laboratory and pioneered the application of operant conditioning into the animal training world. In 1943, they used the technology commercially in their business Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE). Bob Bailey, first Director of Training for the U.S. Navy, joined ABE in 1965 as Research Director, then General Manager, and in 1976 married Marian. ABE was the world's first school for scientific animal training and proved that the new scientific technology could be used to train virtually any kind of animal, and exclusively by reward – no punishment. Developing the 'bridging stimulus', an event marker used to connect the desired behavior with the upcoming delivery of the primary reinforcer turned out to be revolutionary. ABE successful application of operant conditioning in training animals for commercial advertisement and entertainment expanded to training projects for the U.S. Navy, Marine Studios in Florida, Marineland in California and Parrot Jungle. It is thought that the Brelands wrote the first training program and manuals using operant conditioning for training dolphins in 1955 and for exotic birds in 1958. The Misbehavior of Organisms, published by the Brelands in 1961, stated "... the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history and ecological niche."  Among their many other accomplishments, most familiar to the public were TV commercials and animal shows. Puss 'N Boots Cat Food commercials were widely known but most notably is the Buck Bunny television ad for Coast Federal Savings and Loan, which ran for twenty years and holds the record for the longest running TV commercial. The IQ Zoo doors opened in 1955, demonstrating how animals can learn to do tasks using positive reinforcement training, it continued for thirty-five years and expanded internationally. The gates of Animal Wonderland opened in 1972, the first amusement park to display the largest avian show ever in the world. Over 47 years, Marian, Bob and ABE trainers worked with over 140 different species, training more than 15,000 animals and today the technology is being widely used around the world in all fields of animal training.