Gabriela Pavarini
PhD
NDPH Intermediate Fellow
I am an NDPH Intermediate Fellow at the Ethox Centre, focusing on adolescent mental health, arts-based approaches, and the ethics of new technologies in psychiatry. I bring together groups of adolescents, game designers and third-sector organisations to design and test digital tools to promote young people’s civic engagement and wellbeing. I focus on responsible innovation and aim to integrate adolescents’ values into the design of digital mental health interventions.
My Fellowship investigates the efficacy and ethical implications of a “storytelling chatbot” to support Brazilian adolescents to promote community wellbeing. This project extends Engajadamente, a project that maps engagement aspirations and develops the tool, in collaboration with the University of Brasilia and technology company Talk2U. I am also a co-investigator on the ATTUNE project, which investigates how adverse childhood experiences can affect the mental health of UK adolescents, and develops new, arts-based interventions.
Co-production and public engagement are at the heart of my work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked with UK adolescents, research partners and the charity Youth Era to co-design and test an online peer support programme to support adolescent wellbeing. For 3 years I co-led The Lancet Young Leaders for Global Mental Health, with whom I organised a series of in-person and digital mental health festivals and events. With collaborators at Yale, I currently co-lead a Youth Leadership Taskforce for the Early Childhood Peace Consortium.
Prior to joining NDPH, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the NEUROSEC Team at Psychiatry, where I investigated adolescents’ attitudes towards predictive psychiatry and developed novel empirical tools.
Recent publications
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Tracing Tomorrow: young people's preferences and values related to use of personal sensing to predict mental health, using a digital game methodology.
Journal article
Pavarini G. et al, (2024), BMJ Ment Health, 27
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Online peer-led intervention to improve adolescent wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic: a randomised controlled trial.
Journal article
Pavarini G. et al, (2024), Child Adolesc Psychiatry Ment Health, 18
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A collective autoethnography of coproduction in mental health research by academic researchers and young people in Brazil.
Journal article
Siston FR. et al, (2023), BMJ Glob Health, 8
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Typologies and Features of Play in Mobile Games for Mental Wellbeing
Journal article
Reay E. et al, (2023), Simulation and Gaming, 54, 508 - 533
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Your best friend is missing and only you can find him A chat-story to promote peer support and collective action for mental health
Conference paper
Pavarini G. et al, (2023), Proceedings of IDC 2023 - 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Rediscovering Childhood, 732 - 735