Gabriela Pavarini

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.