Dr Gabriella D’Avino

PhD in Social Policy, University of Birmingham, 2024

MA in Social Research (Social Policy), University of Birmingham, 2020

MA in Human Rights, Culture & Social Justice, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015

BA in International Relations & Diplomatic Affairs, University of Bologna, 2013

Gabriella D’Avino is a migration scholar whose work focuses on refugee resettlement, community sponsorship, complementary pathways and the role of social networks in shaping integration outcomes. Her research sits at the intersection of social policy, governance and lived experience, combining methodological rigour with sustained engagement across academic, policy and practitioner communities.

She completed her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham in 2024, passing with no corrections. Her doctoral research developed an innovative mixed-methods approach to social network analysis, combining visualisation tools with participatory techniques to examine the relational dimensions of refugee integration under the UK’s Community Sponsorship and Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Schemes. This work contributed new evidence on how emotional support, informal relationships and local infrastructures shape refugees’ access to services, rights and forms of belonging. Findings from her PhD have been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Building on her doctoral research, Gabriella has developed a strong international profile through applied and comparative work on sponsorship and complementary pathways across Europe. She has undertaken consultancy and research roles with organisations such as the International Catholic Migration Commission, Porticus, the University of Ottawa’s Refugee Hub and the University of Maryland. These roles involved programme evaluation, stakeholder engagement and policy analysis across six European countries, contributing to evidence for national governments, the European Commission and civil society organisations. Her work has produced policy briefs, implementation toolkits and strategic recommendations.

In 2025, Gabriella was awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Open University. Her fellowship examines the legal and policy infrastructures underpinning sponsorship and complementary pathways in the UK, strengthens the legal-sociological dimension of her research.

Gabriella’s academic career is complemented by experience in project coordination, participatory methods and cross-sectoral collaboration. She has co-organised national symposia, co-edited a special journal issue on community sponsorship and complementary pathways, and delivered invited lectures in the UK and internationally. Her research has been presented at major conferences such as IMISCOE, IASFM and IRIS, and her insights have shaped training materials and practitioner guidance for organisations working directly with refugees.

Before her doctoral studies, Gabriella completed an MA in Social Research (Social Policy) at the University of Birmingham and an MA in Human Rights, Culture & Social Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she received an award for outstanding academic achievement. She also worked as a legal assistant supporting asylum and immigration cases, an experience that continues to inform her commitment to rights-based and participatory approaches in research.

Currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, Gabriella brings to her work a distinctive combination of analytical depth, policy engagement and methodological innovation. As a multilingual researcher with lived experience of migration, she is committed to producing research that is both academically rigorous and meaningful for the communities, practitioners and policymakers it aims to inform.

Refugee Sponsorship Research Programme 

At the University of Birmingham, Gabriella has played a central role in one of the world’s most extensive research programmes on refugee sponsorship, developed within IRiS. Since 2016, this programme has examined how sponsorship schemes operate in practice, how they shape the experiences of refugees and volunteers, and how policy can better support community-led integration. Gabriella’s work has involved comparative studies, systematic literature reviews and extensive qualitative fieldwork, contributing to major reports, nearly twenty policy briefs, a practitioner toolkit and multiple peer-reviewed publications. Key themes include governance, volunteer dynamics, refugee wellbeing and autonomy, public attitudes, emotional support, operational challenges and the development of complementary pathways. 

Advancing Refugee Protection and Integration: Resettlement, Community Sponsorship and Complementary Pathways 

Gabriella’s current research, funded through an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Open University, examines the legal and policy infrastructures underpinning refugee sponsorship and complementary pathways in the UK. This project analyses how regulatory frameworks shape mobility, access to protection and integration trajectories across schemes such as Community Sponsorship, Homes for Ukraine and Communities for Afghans. The fellowship advances interdisciplinary understanding of how community-led and hybrid models of protection operate within contemporary asylum systems. 

Refugee Integration in Scholarship: Conceptual Ambiguity, Geographic Gaps and AI-Assisted Scoping Review

Gabriella is a co-investigator on a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant examining how refugee integration is conceptualised across two decades of academic scholarship. The project undertakes a full-text systematic scoping review of literature published between 2001 and 2025, analysing how concepts such as integration, assimilation, belonging and inclusion are defined, operationalised and contested across disciplines, methods and global contexts. Using AI-assisted tools, the study also evaluates how machine-learning techniques can support large-scale conceptual mapping in the social sciences.