April D. Fernando, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with thirty years of experience supporting children, youth, and families through direct service, teaching, program administration, and consultation. She has provided individual, group, and family therapy in private practice, community-based organizations, and university counseling centers, where she also served in clinical supervisor, trainer, and executive leadership roles.

Dr. Fernando has also focused much of her career on developing the human services workforce to integrate trauma-informed and culturally relevant approaches—as a tenured professor teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology, directing counseling psychology programs, and developing practicum and internship programs for psychologists. In the past nine years, she has provided system-level consultation to non-profit agencies, child welfare, behavioral health, justice, and educational systems nationally and internationally to implement outcomes management approaches, and trained workforces on using data from person-centered assessment tools for better decision-making and improved outcomes.

Dr. Fernando is a former Associate Director at the Center for Innovation in Population Health at the University of Kentucky where she worked with many statewide child welfare and behavioral health systems on the implementation of Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM) strategies that included the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), Adult Needs and Strengths Assessment (ANSA), the Family Advocacy and Support Tool (FAST), and the Crisis Assessment Tool (CAT). For over twenty years she was a clinician and senior mental health administrator at Westcoast Children’s Clinic in Oakland, CA. She is the former tenured faculty and co-director of the master’s program in Pastoral Counseling and Counseling Psychology at Holy Names College. She currently serves on the board of directors of the National Register for Health Service Psychologists.

Dr. Fernando’s clinical experience and training, her understanding of program development and management, her ability to translate research to practical application, and her collaborative approach to consultation can help organizations and systems identify and harness their resources toward a more productive change management process.