In addition to her work as a nurse, Sylvia Agbih studied philosophy and social behavioural sciences at the Distance Learning University of Hagen in the Master's degree programme, which she successfully completed in 2011. In addition to a variety of teaching activities, she has dealt in particular with ethical questions in the context of medicine and nursing. She is fundamentally interested in the relationship between anthropology and ethics, approaches to narrative ethics as well as dealing with and the role of emotions, communication, empathy and transculturality in ethics.

In her dissertation project at Bielefeld University in the interdisciplinary research training group "FlüGe - Challenges and Opportunities of Global Refugee Migration for Health Care in Germany", in which she also worked as a research assistant from 2016 - 2021, she addresses problems of the restricted health care for refugees under the Asylum Seekers' Benefits Act from a philosophical-ethical perspective.

The starting point of her work is the life situation of refugees. In the course of this discussion, she critically examines concepts of vulnerability, social inclusion - exclusion, othering and racism, as well as their connection to health, justice and recognition. Taking up the interdisciplinary model of structural and social determinants of health, the study of housing and accommodation conditions of refugees proves to be a central approach for understanding the multi-layered and interwoven phenomena of social exclusion and health inequality in the place of asylum.

Since September 2021, she has been working as a research assistant on the project "Shelter in Place? Improving the Ethics of Infection Control Measures in Times of Covid-19." at the Chair of Ethics in Medicine at the University of Augsburg.