Tackling children's health

Randi Bates remembers feeling just a little rumble, but she thought nothing of it.

She didn’t have great cellphone service or Wi-Fi. Her assignment focused on providing health education to a community in the Dominican Republic.

Bates, a newly-licensed nurse at the time, was near the end of a two-year mission in the Peace Corps in 2010 when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook the island of Hispaniola striking hardest near Port-au-Prince, the capital of neighboring Haiti. More than 300,000 people were reportedly killed and millions of other residents saw their livelihoods in peril.

“It was unprecedented devastation. What happened was the earthquake just crushed all of their communications towers, airports, you name it,” explains Bates. “They had to take injured Haitians to an area where it was safe. It’s kind of the first principle of first aid, make sure your environment is safe, and then you can attend to those injured.”

Bates, now an assistant professor in the UC College of Nursing, says the experience profoundly shaped her career path. 

She was a newly licensed nurse who grew up in the Appalachian town of Ashtabula, Ohio, when she visited the Caribbean. Bates wasn’t technically licensed to practice in another country, but her bosses explained it was “all-hands-on-deck” and that her talents were needed.

Assigned to a shelter to work an overnight shift, Bates was needed where there were fewer trained clinicians. 

“We kept everyone pretty medically stable, but there were many children,” Bates remembers. “For some, we didn’t know where their parents were or any of their family members. Can you imagine a child all alone during this? They would have their arms or legs in casts, and they couldn’t move. Some would just scream in the night.”

“We just didn’t know what to do, and I was so new at this,” says Bates, who also teaches doctoral students at UC. “It was a new experience for everyone.

“Afterward, I vowed to come back to the United States and be the best nurse I could be. I wanted to give every child and family the opportunity to thrive.”

“That led me to go back to college and to get a lot more experience as a registered nurse. Then I became a family nurse practitioner so I could care for families. In time I was working with a colleague who was getting a doctorate and I thought, ‘Wow, could that be me. Eventually, with some wonderful opportunities for nurses, it was.”

From a family with many immigrants from Italy, Bates watched her father work tirelessly in the construction yards of Ashtabula to provide for his family. There weren’t too many avenues for good paying jobs in the working class community, but nursing was one occupation she saw aunts and cousins choose. She also saw her father come home with first-aid kits as part of work and she would often study them and imagine herself caring for those who needed medical care.

“Helping others has always been an important part of my life,” says Bates, who holds a Bachelor of Science in nursing degree, a master’s degree and doctorate from Ohio State University.

Researching an emerging area of focus

As a UC researcher, Bates uses her knowledge and experience to focus on the impact of stress on children. That stress can be experienced directly by children or indirectly impact them. For example, if adults in their lives are under duress, it affects a child’s daily well-being as well. 

The children she saw in earthquake-stricken Haiti were clearly experiencing traumatic stress, but for many children the circumstances aren’t as clear-cut.

“A lot of my work focuses on early childhood mental health, and a part of that is their stress,” explains Bates. “Very young children can’t exactly tell you that they’re stressed. As a parent or caregiver, you might see a child crying, and that might represent some kind of stress, but not all stress is bad, necessarily.”

Bates also teaches and trains graduate nursing students in research techniques. 

Last year Bates was awarded a five-year $3.4 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to lead a team studying how socioecological factors may influence sleep health in young children. Toxic stress was among those factors.

She was honored this month with a Crane Excellence in Early Childhood Award from The Ohio State University and is the recipient of the 2025 Distinguished Nurse Researcher Award from Mount St. Joseph University.

Bates recently offered research presentations at the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology that looked at physical and mental health of early childhood educators and how stress might be measured in young children with wearable technology. 

She and her research team say early childhood educators are at high risk of depression and lack access to evidence-based care, which may result in increased multi-level outcomes from child expulsion, impaired educator well-being, workplace turnover, and health care costs. Their findings were also recently published in the Early Childhood Education Journal.

Wearable technologies provide an accessible avenue for researchers and scholars to explore stress-related, practical nursing education and research. Typically, researchers in the field measure stress hormones, including the release of cortisol, in toddlers and infants, who can’t tell the adults around them that they are feeling significant stress. Perfecting wearable technologies in children could be a great benefit for parents.

“It could be a prime opportunity for parents to get a sense of how their child is feeling daily because what is really important is that many later mental health issues can be identified before the child is five,” says Bates.

Wearables to measure reactions in children could help specify what exactly is this stress, says Bates. “Is this a significant mental health issue that we should focus on?” she adds.

Bates is one of nearly two dozen faculty at the UC College of Nursing who tackle complex health care issues. The UC researchers study a range of topics: ailments and morbidities that impact vulnerable populations; ways to improve the care of chronic illnesses for aging residents; occupational health and safety measures for health care workers and use data science to create health solutions for society.

Dean Alicia Ribar of the UC College of Nursing says researchers and educators like Bates help the college achieve its goals.

“Dr. Bates’s work exemplifies the depth and impact of nursing research in advancing health and well-being,” says Ribar. “At UC, we are deeply committed to supporting faculty who pursue innovative, evidence-based research that addresses real-world health challenges. Through her research, Dr. Bates is contributing valuable insights that can inform better care, guide policy and strengthen families and communities.”

Learn more about Dr. Randi Bates online.