Bob Atkins: Rutgers, The State University

After a happy childhood in an affluent suburb in New Jersey, Bob Atkins, Ph.D., M.S. N., B.S. N., B.A., embarked on a conventional journey through young adulthood: he started college at Brown University, double-majored in political science and American civilization, and set his sights on a career as a lawyer.

But Atkins hit a fork in the proverbial road his senior year of college when he took a part-time job in Providence, R.I., working with children and teenagers in a psychiatric facility, and discovered the joys of working with kids in a health care setting. He stayed on full-time the year after he graduated, dropped his legal ambitions, and surprised his friends and family—including his mother, a registered nurse—when he decided to become a nurse.

A black male in a class of mainly white women at the University of Pennsylvania, Atkins quickly adjusted to his new life as an outlier—a role he has continued to play ever since. After he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in nursing, he again went against the grain; instead of taking the traditional start to a nursing career—two years as a medical-surgical nurse--he became a school nurse in East Camden, N.J., a poverty-stricken urban area just a few miles from his hometown of Cherry Hill.

Atkins loved the job from day one and, while there, founded a youth development program that blends constructive after-school activities like soccer, ice-skating and tree planting with academic achievement. At the same time, he earned a master’s degree in nursing at Rutgers University, where he befriended a psychology professor who was researching the effects of life in high-poverty urban areas on the development of children’s personalities. Why are poor children, for instance, more likely to grow up to become risk-takers and engage in behaviors such as early and unprotected sex?

The research sparked an interest in Atkins, who decided to pursue related questions as a doctoral student in public health at Temple University in Philadelphia. In his research, he studied the effects of the pre- and post-natal environment on young children’s personalities and found that fetuses and babies from more stressful intrauterine and early infancy environments were more likely to become “under-controlled” children by the time they turned five or six. In other words, babies of mothers who smoked and drank during pregnancy, did not seek regular prenatal care, and did not breastfeed were less emotionally stable and more prone to disorders such as hyperactivity and aggressiveness—characteristics that are linked with risky health behavior.

Atkins has delved deeper into these and other questions about how to improve children’s health literacy, especially among the poor, as an assistant professor at Rutgers. The conclusions have real-world implications for government spending. To improve health in adulthood, policy-makers should divert more money to early childhood development to help prevent children from developing “under-controlled” personalities, he says.

In 2008, Atkins was one of 15 junior faculty nationwide to receive an inaugural Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholar award. The three-year, $350,000 award is supporting his efforts to collect qualitative and quantitative data from high-school aged youth living in Camden, N.J., as well as providing training to prepare him for academic leadership and translating evidence into policy and practice initiatives.

Atkins’ unconventional research into the psychology of health is just one way he stands out in academic nursing. And standing out is a role he relishes in a classroom full of high-achieving, highly motivated students at Rutgers. “I like being this alternative role model,” he says. “I get the opportunity to motivate students to think about life outside the hospital, which is so important for nursing right now.”