Gabriela Pavarini is a Senior Departmental Lecturer at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), University of Oxford. Gabriela’s work is highly interdisciplinary, combining adolescent mental health, ethics and digital innovation. Gabriela brings together groups of adolescents, game designers and practitioners to design and test innovative tools to promote youth participation and wellbeing.
Rather than passive “recipients” of resources, she believes adolescents should be seen as “agents of change”, who advocate for their rights, build awareness, champion interventions, empower communities and provide a fresh impetus to mental health policy. Her work focuses on responsible innovation and aims to bring young people’s voices into ethical debates around advanced technologies and mental health care. Recent innovations include Tracing Tomorrow, a digital game that voiced the perspectives of over 6k UK adolescents on the ethics of predictive psychiatric interventions; and Uplift, an online peer-to-peer intervention that promoted adolescent civic engagement and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. She currently co-leads Engajadamente, a project that is developing a chat-story to empower Brazilian adolescents to promote community wellbeing.
Public engagement is at the heart of her work. She has established groups of adolescents in the UK and LMICs to help optimise research and interventions, and has published guidelines for youth co-production. The public engagement work she has led has been awarded university and external prizes, including the 2020 World Dignity Project’s Mental Health Champions Award. Prior to joining DSPI, Gabriela worked as a Research Fellow at Oxford Population Health and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Psychiatry. She received her MPhil and PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge.
