April K. Watkins, DNP, APRN, ACNS-BC
April K. Watkins, DNP, APRN, ACNS-BC
Recipient of The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing’s 2022 Rising Star Alumni Award
April K. Watkins is a clinical assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Nursing and an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse specializing in cardiac electrophysiology at Ascension Texas Cardiovascular. She also serves as the Director of Nursing–Global Projects for InterVol, an international nonprofit dedicated to improving health care access worldwide.
Watkins began her career in marketing but was inspired to pursue nursing after volunteering in Austin to assist Hurricane Katrina evacuees in 2005. She enrolled in the Alternate Entry Master’s in Nursing program at UT Austin and graduated on May 21, 2010. That same day, she boarded a flight to Haiti, joining a 15-person medical team providing care in Léogâne, the epicenter of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. This experience launched her 12-year tenure with InterVol, during which she organized medical relief missions for underserved populations, including rural communities in Haiti, Venezuelan refugee camps in Boa Vista, Brazil, and a primary care clinic on the island of Guanaja, Honduras.
After earning her DNP in 2022, Watkins established a nurse-led specialized atrial fibrillation clinic at Ascension Seton. Her clinical work focuses on reducing the burden of atrial fibrillation through behavior change, risk factor modification and patient self-management strategies aimed at preventing unnecessary emergency department visits and hospitalizations. She also teaches in UT Austin’s clinical nurse specialist program and has presented her scholarly work at the Heart Rhythm Society conference in Boston (2021) and internationally at Venice Arrhythmias in Italy (2022).
Watkins holds a BA in French and Political Science from Indiana University Bloomington and both an MSN and DNP from the UT Austin School of Nursing.