Assistant Professor of Psychology Shivon Robinson ’11 researches the effects of neonatal opioid exposure in child development. Robinson graduated from Williams in 2011 with a double major in psychology and biology before earning her doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. In her graduate work, Robinson focused on the neural mechanisms behind depression and anxiety as well as treatments targeting those mechanisms. She became interested in studying opioids as a postdoctoral fellow in 2017, the year the opioid epidemic was declared a national emergency. “The work that I do is informed by human experiences, and my goal is that what we learn can eventually be applied to that,” she told the Record.
Robinson’s lab currently studies both the short- and long-term effects of opioid exposure in neonatal mice in hopes of helping to identify effective treatments for human babies. When infants are exposed to opioids in utero, they can experience Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS) after birth. “We call it central nervous system excitability,” Robinson said. “It can be this excessive crying. They’re also really hard to control — they might have trouble feeding, sometimes they have gastrointestinal problems, and also you might see flu-like symptoms.” The symptoms observed in infants are similar to those of adults with opioid withdrawal. “Because they are so young, there’s this additional aspect of ‘How might that withdrawal be impacting developmental processes?’” Robinson said.
This year, Robinson is working with two senior thesis students, Maya Tait ’26, and Camily Hidalgo Gonçalves ’26. According to Tait, it’s hard to study neonatal opioid exposure over time. “The second you look at long-term development, you have so many different confounding variables coming in, and you have trouble with follow-up rates and continuous access to care throughout, let’s say, the first two years of life,” Tait said. In response to these difficulties, the Robinson lab studies NOWS in mice instead of human subjects to get a sense of how early opioid exposure and withdrawal can affect brain development.
There are two stages of mouse development during which neonatal opioid exposure can be studied: in utero, or during the first two weeks of their life. The Robinson lab uses the latter, which, according to Tait, has a similar effect on brain development as exposure during the third trimester of human pregnancy.
This approach minimizes confounding variables. “We are really interested in how the drug is impacting that individual animal, whereas with the in-utero exposure, we also have to consider how the drug is affecting the mom, the dad, and whether or not that might be impacting maternal behavior,” Tait said.
The lab studies both the immediate and long-term effects of opioid exposure. After exposing the mice to opioids, Robinson and her thesis students track withdrawal symptoms and developmental markers as the mice mature. “If you’re interested in studying behavior, particularly when you’re trying to map it onto some human behavior, a lot of it is just figuring out, ‘What is the phenotype in humans, and how do we best match it to what we see in mice?’” Robinson said.
Developmental markers include weight, stress response, inflammatory markers in the brain, and babies’ ability to roll over from their back to their front. One system that the lab has found to be significantly impacted by opioids is the stress response system. Through this work, Robinson hopes to provide some insight into the mechanisms of current treatments for opioid withdrawal as well as other potential targets for treating infants with NOWS.
Robinson also looks at how environmental factors affect the mice, including exposure to other substances and effects of growing up around drug use. The lab tries to control for differences in the social environments of the mice. “You can have a paradigm where instead of just one rat mom or mouse mom and her babies, it might be two or multiple,” Robinson said. “That would be an example of social enrichment.”
Robinson hopes that the research will illuminate which brain activities to target for treatment in infants with NOWS. “We see different adaptations in the brain because of that drug exposure,” Robinson said. “If we’re able to see that, we can then target some of those systems for a treatment.”
The lab is currently studying a drug that is already used for neonatal opioid withdrawal treatment. Through clinical studies, it is known that this drug is effective, but its mechanisms are still not fully understood. “What we can do with our research is then look at a mechanistic level,” Robinson said. “What is this drug doing?”
Editor’s note: Satya Kluth, an Executive Editor At-Large on the Record and research assistant in the Robinson Lab, was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
