Dr Gabriela Pavarini
Senior Research Fellow
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.
Dr Pavarini can be found on LinkedIn.
