Dr Gabriela Pavarini
Dr Gabriela Pavarini is a Senior Departmental Lecturer at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI) at the University of Oxford. In addition, she is Associate Faculty at Oxford Population Health’s Ethox Centre and a Research Fellow at Reuben College. Gabriela’s research adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, combining mental health science, children’s rights, bioethics, moral psychology, and justice-centred technological design.
Gabriela leads the Co-Design and Mental Health (COM) Team, which focuses on co-designing and evaluating evidence-based, creative interventions for adolescents. A key emphasis is on promoting youth participation, prosocial values and community mental health, through interventions that combine digital technology and arts-based tools such as storytelling. Gabriela is committed to ensuring that young people’s voices are included in the design and implementation of mental health initiatives. She is particularly interested in understanding adolescents’ perspectives on digital and school-based interventions, and exploring how mental health interventions, policies, and research can prioritise equity and social justice.
Gabriela’s work is centred on co-production and cross-sector collaboration, bringing together adolescents, parents, teachers, charities, industry partners, policymakers, and researchers from diverse fields. She uses a range of research methods, including co-design, surveys, randomised controlled trials, qualitative research, and systematic reviews. To make research more engaging and meaningful, Gabriela also incorporates gamified and arts-based approaches. Committed to open science, she ensures that data, knowledge, and tools are widely shared across academia and with broader communities. Gabriela’s team is also committed to building supportive research environments, grounded in kindness, creativity, and inclusivity.
Gabriela leads the Qualitative Methods module of the MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation (EBSIPE). She also leads qualitative and mixed methods training within DSPI’s Methods Hub for DPhil students. She supervises MSc and DPhil students at DSPI and Oxford Population Health. She also delivers lectures on psychosocial interventions, digital mental health, and ethics across various graduate programmes at the university. Gabriela is Admissions Tutor for the EBSIPE Programme (2025 entry).
Before starting at DSPI, Gabriela held an NDPH Fellowship at the Ethox Centre, Oxford Population Health, and was a Welcome Trust Postdoctoral Researcher with the Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Team at the Oxford Department of Psychiatry. She holds a PhD and an MPhil (with distinction) in Psychology from the University of Cambridge.Â
Dr Pavarini can be found on LinkedIn.Â
Information to come.
Youth participation for global wellbeing
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises youth participation as a fundamental human right. When adolescents actively engage in mental health and well-being initiatives, it not only benefits them personally but also positively impacts their peers and communities. This project lays the foundation for a large-scale evaluation and rollout of a co-designed narrative chatbot in Brazil. Named "Cadê o Kauê?", this chat-based story aims to promote adolescents’ skills to support each other’s mental health. The project is organised into four work packages. WP1 aims to develop and validate scales to assess peer support and collective action in mental health among Brazilian adolescents. WP2 is a feasibility and acceptability study of the chatbot in Brazilian schools. WP3 is a qualitative study gathering teacher insights on youth voice and participation in schools. WP4 uses gameplay data to understand young people’s choices related to supporting their peers’ mental health. Together, these studies will help refine the chat-story for large-scale evaluation and rollout, fostering meaningful mental health support among young people in Brazil. The project is supported by an NDPH Fellowship to Gabriela as PI in collaboration with Prof Sheila Murta at the University of BrasÃlia (2021-2024). Further collaborators include Rafa Alves, Elvina Crowe, Prof Angela Marin, Dr Josimar Mendes, Dr Sakshi Setia, and Prof Vinicius Coscioni. It follows on Engajadamente, a project that developed the intervention using a co-production approach.
Watch the Making Of ‘Cadê o Kauê?’, featuring the Engajadamente Youth Collaborative Group
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ATTUNE
Gabriela is Co-I and Ethics Lead on the UKRI-funded ATTUNE Project, a £3.8 million project (2021–2025) led by Prof. Kamaldeep Bhui and Prof. Minhua Ma. The project examines the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on young people’s mental health, focusing on creative and digital approaches for prevention and support. By collaborating with youth through arts, music, and digital tools, ATTUNE aims to understand their lived experiences, identify resilience points, and develop accessible interventions, including a co-designed serious game to improve engagement with therapeutic services. Working alongside clinical researcher Dr Lindsay Smith, Gabriela is responsible for the Ethics Cross-Cutting Theme, which aims to integrate young people’s voices into the ethics of participatory arts-based methods and gaming interventions in mental health.
Amplifying the voices of young people for sustainable development in mental health (aka Engajadamente).
Funded by the British Academy Youth Futures Programme, this project co-created ‘Cadê o Kauê?’, a digital intervention to support adolescents in Brazil as agents of change for mental health. Brazil has not only been among the countries most impacted by the pandemic, but has also faced some significant political setbacks and threats to children’s rights over the past years. The project involved mapping aspirations and barriers for youth involvement in mental health promotion through a large-scale survey in collaboration with UNICEF, followed by a national qualitative study led by postdoctoral researcher Dr Josimar Mendes. These results guided the creation of a ‘storytelling chatbot’, a gamified digital bot integrated onto Instagram Direct Messaging Service. The bot focuses on promoting adolescents’ skills for peer support and collective action, and raising awareness of social determinants of mental health. Unique to this project was its immersive co-production model, with adolescents, industry partners and researchers working as equals, as documented in a collective autoethnography led by postdoctoral researcher Dr Felipe Siston. This project was a collaboration with the University of Brasilia, a Youth Collaborative Group (Brenda Rocha, Julyana Alves, Rafa Alves, Rafaela Cunha, and Victor Lima), and the start-up health-tech company Talk2U, led by Dr Gabriela Pavarini, Prof Sheila Murta and Prof Ilina Singh (2020-2022).
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COVID-19 Peer Support ProjectÂ
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gabriela was PI on a project that co-designed and trialled Uplift, a peer support training programme for UK adolescents. The project was a collaboration with the peer support charity Youth Era, and partners at Oxford, Imperial and the McPin Foundation. In a follow-up project, trained research participants were invited back as collaborators, to co-design and co-deliver ‘Coping during Covid’, an online course to help adolescents cope with the emotional challenges of the pandemic crisis. Coping during COVID was then trialled in the UK. These programmes were found to improve young people’s sense of purpose, wellbeing, and ability to support others. Uplift is now available to adolescents worldwide via Youth Era at upliftpeers.com. The project was funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund and ESRC Impact Acceleration Account through the University of Oxford’s COVID-19: Economic, Social, Cultural, & Environmental Impacts – Urgent Response Fund, with the follow up study funded by a Westminster Foundation grant to Prof Ilina Singh and Dr Gabriela Pavarini (2020-2021).
Watch a video produced by Youth Era about the Uplift Programme.
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Citizens: Early Intervention Ethics
As a Postdoctoral Researcher, Gabriela led the Citizens Project within the Wellcome Trust-funded BeGOOD Project (PI: Prof. Ilina Singh). ‘Citizens’ aimed at integrating youth voices into the ethics of mental health interventions including digital phenotyping, predictive genetic testing, and chatbot therapists. To engage adolescents at scale, Gabriela and the Citizens Team pioneered novel methods for working with young people including digital role-play and a narrative game called Tracing Tomorrow. The game reached over 20k users, with gameplay data from UK adolescents revealing significant privacy concerns regarding the use of digital sensing information such as social media and internet searches to predict mental health. The game represented the first Design Bioethics tool, demonstrating the potential of building purpose-built digital tools to integrate context, narrative and embodiment, and engender situated engagement with bioethical questions.
Gabriela welcomes inquiries from prospective DPhil students and Postdoctoral Researchers from various disciplines who share her research interests. She is especially interested in researchers looking to pursue empirical studies in the following areas:
- Youth engagement and participation
- Digital mental health, including gaming and AI-based solutions to promote adolescent outcomes
- Adolescent mental health, prosociality, and social values
- School mental health
- Children and young people’s rights
- Activism and collective action
- Design justice and community-based practices
- Ethical considerations in mental health interventions, policies and research
- Adolescent consent, competence, and confidentiality
When reaching out, please include your CV and a brief proposal outlining your research idea and proposed methodology.
Gabriela particularly welcomes inquiries from researchers under-represented at Oxford, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, LGBTQIA+ communities, individuals with disabilities or lived experience of mental health challenges, and researchers based in the Global South.
Gabriela’s publications can be found on Google Scholar page.
