Noah Robinson

Graduate Student
Research Area: Clinical Science

Research

Noah Robinson is a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at Vanderbilt University, studying under Dr. Steven Hollon, and is also founder and CEO of Innerworld, Inc. Noah has built a clinical research platform to explore how social virtual reality environments (“the metaverse”) can be used to deliver transdiagnostic cognitive behavioral peer support. Noah has received funding from NIH and NSF to use his platform for the treatment of substance use disorders. For more information on Innerworld, visit https://inner.world or see this demo video of Innerworld: https://youtu.be/NvSBJWu-EHE

Background

Noah received his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was an undergraduate research assistant in two primary labs: Dr. Clara Hill’s Maryland Psychotherapy Clinic & Research Lab (MPCRL), and Dr. Carl Lejuez’s Center for Addictions, Personality, & Emotion Research (CAPER). For his undergraduate thesis, Noah explored the relationship between crying and attachment across 1,074 sessions of  psychotherapy. He found that different types of crying were correlated with both client and therapist attachment variables, and that over 50% of the variance in the occurrence of crying was accounted for by the therapist’s own attachment style. These results were published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

After graduating, Noah spent two years in the Rehabilitation Medicine Department at the National Institutes of Health as a post-baccalaureate research fellow. He began on a qualitative research project to explore meaning and purpose for patients with rare and undiagnosed diseases, and worked with Dr. Susan Robertson to develop a model of how patients adapt to functional loss in the face of uncertainty. In his second year, Noah joined the Functional and Applied Biomechanics section under Dr. Diane Damiano to develop virtual reality environments that elicit targeted motor responses in children with cerebral palsy.