Dian Dowling Evans, PhD

About Dian Dowling Evans

Dian Dowling Evans, FNP, practices DPC Family Medicine at Highland Urgent Care Family Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. She holds a BS in nursing from the Medical College of Georgia, an MSN from Emory University, and a PhD from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, and she started out her career as a counselor.

She worked alongside a physician colleague in the emergency room at Gwinnett Medical Center for five years starting in 1999, and in 2008 she reached out to him about setting up Highland Urgent Care & Family Medicine as a clinical training site. Her PhD dissertation researched yoga's effects on chronic pain.

She is also dually board certified as a family and emergency nurse practitioner, and she directs Emory's Emergency Nurse Practitioner program as a Clinical Professor. She co-founded the American Academy of Emergency Nurse Practitioners in 2014 and has served on committees that set the standards and process for ENP board certification. Highland Urgent Care & Family Medicine offers a Direct Primary Care membership. In 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, one of the field's highest honors. She has said, "I realized that if I became a nurse, I'd have more skills to help the whole person. It's the best career decision I've ever made." Evans has also co-authored "Effects of patient race on processes and experiences of clinical interactions in US emergency departments: A mixed-methods systematic review," published in PLoS One in 2025.