Gabriela Pavarini

Gabriela is an Intermediate Fellow at the Ethox Centre, focusing on adolescent mental health, arts-based approaches, and the ethics of new technologies in psychiatry.

She brings 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. She focusses on responsible innovation and aims to integrate adolescents’ values into the design of digital mental health interventions. 

Gabriela's 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.

She is 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 Gabriela's work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she 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 she co-led The Lancet Young Leaders for Global Mental Health, with whom she organised a series of in-person and digital mental health festivals and events. With collaborators at Yale, Gabriela currently co-leads a Youth Leadership Taskforce for the Early Childhood Peace Consortium.

Prior to joining Oxford Population Health, Gabriela was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the NEUROSEC Team at Psychiatry, where she investigated adolescents’ attitudes towards predictive psychiatry and developed novel empirical tools.