About Me.
Aspiring physician. Researcher. Advocate.
Balancing science, soccer, and service on the path to becoming a physician.
Meet The Scientist
Hey, I’m Dylan Williams, a student, athlete, and aspiring physician from Canton, Georgia. I’m studying Biomedical Science and Enterprise at Georgia State University, where I’ve learned how science can be used to understand people and improve lives. My curiosity has always centered on the brain, especially how it shapes the way we speak, learn, and connect with others. Through my research in neuroscience and language disorders, I’ve seen how small discoveries in the lab can have a real impact on people’s quality of life. Whether I’m coding data from patient interviews or helping set up brain stimulation sessions, I’m motivated by the idea that better research can lead to better care.
Outside the lab, I’m a Division I soccer player and that experience has taught me discipline, teamwork, and how to perform under pressure. Balancing sports, academics, and research has shown me the value of persistence and staying grounded in what matters most: helping people. My goal is to become a doctor who bridges science and compassion, using what I’ve learned through research and athletics to advocate for patients, especially those in underserved communities.
Signature Experience
When the Questions Are the Problem: Rethinking Quality of Life Surveys for People With Brain Tumors
Introduction:
Imagine you are filling out a medical survey about your life after a brain tumor. You are trying to focus, the words are small on the screen, and you hit a question like, “I am losing hope in the fight against my illness.” You know this is important, but the wording feels heavy and confusing. You pause, ask the person next to you to explain it again, and suddenly the survey feels more like a test you might fail than a tool that is supposed to help. For many people living with a brain tumor, it is not just fatigue, pain, or seizures that shape their day. Tumors and treatment can also affect the parts of the brain that handle language. That means finding words, understanding sentences, and keeping up in conversations can all become harder.
My project looked at a simple but powerful question: “Are the quality of life questionnaires we use actually friendly to people who have language difficulties from brain tumors, or are the questions themselves creating barriers?” To explore this, I compared two tools. One is the standard brain cancer quality of life survey, the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy Brain, often called FACT-Br. The other is a communication focused survey called the Communicative Participation Item Bank, or CPIB. What I found suggests that wording really does matter.
Body:
Quality of life surveys, also called patient reported outcome measures, are supposed to help patients speak for themselves about how they are doing. They guide doctors, shape research, and can even influence which treatments are funded. That only works if the questions are easy to understand for the people filling them out. The FACT-Br is a well-known survey made specifically for people with brain tumors. It asks about physical symptoms, emotions, family roles, and daily functioning. The CPIB is different as it focuses on how communication problems affect everyday life, like talking to friends, ordering at a restaurant, or speaking in a group.
In my project, seven adults from an Emory brain tumor support group completed both the FACT-Br and the CPIB, then took part in recorded interviews over Webex. All of them had some level of language difficulty. During the interviews, we could see in real time how they reacted to each questionnaire. A clear pattern began to show up. When participants worked through the CPIB, their answers came quickly. They chose “not at all,” “a little,” “quite a bit,” or “very much” with confidence. The questions are short and concrete, such as “Does your condition interfere with talking with people you know?” which helped the conversation to move smoothly. Things changed with the FACT Br which included participants often stopping, asking for questions to be read again, or getting tripped up by wording like “I am losing hope in the fight against my illness” or “I am able to work.” One person laughed and said, “This is one of these negative, the opposite of the question.” Another participant asked, “If I can do it, is that the higher number or the lower number?”
The longer the survey went on, the more mental effort they seemed to need. One participant said, “I can do it for a period of time, but my brain gets tired.” Another admitted they sometimes pick the same number over and over because they could not keep all the questions straight. Even though the numbers on the two questionnaires were strongly related, meaning people who scored higher on one tended to score higher on the other, the interviews told a different story. Behind those numbers, many answers on the FACT-Br were only possible because the interviewer stepped in to explain or rephrase. Without that help, several participants would have chosen scores that did not match what they actually meant. In other words, the content of the questions was important, but the way the questions were written was just as important.
Methodology:
This project was part of a larger study in the Aphasia and Motor Speech Disorders Research Lab at Georgia State University. The larger study looked at how a language focused brain tumor support group affected people emotionally and socially. My part of the project zoomed in on the questionnaires themselves. First, we recruited seven adults from an existing brain tumor support group at Emory. To join, they had to be at least 18 years old, have had a brain tumor, and have attended the language support group recently. All had access to a computer or tablet with a camera and were comfortable being recorded. At the start of each Webex session, a trained student researcher shared their screen and walked the participant through two questionnaires. The first was the CPIB, which measures how communication problems affect participation in everyday life. The second was the FACT-Br, which measures overall quality of life for people with brain tumors, including physical, emotional, social, and functional well-being. The researcher read each question out loud, helped adjust the view on the screen, and recorded each response. If a participant looked confused, asked for clarification, or changed an answer after more explanation, that was all captured in the video and transcript. After the questionnaires, participants completed a semi structured interview about their experiences in the support group and in daily life with a brain tumor.
For the numbers side of the project, I scored each questionnaire using its official scoring instructions. Then used a rank-based statistic called Spearman’s Rank-Order Correlation to see how strongly the CPIB scores were related to the FACT-Br scores and also to the Additional Concerns section of the FACT Br, which asks more brain specific questions. In simple terms, we checked whether people who scored higher on one measure tended to score higher on the other.
For the language side, we used thematic analysis. I read the interview transcripts several times and highlighted any moments where participants struggled with wording, asked for clarification, seemed mentally fatigued, or needed the interviewer’s help to choose a response. These moments were labeled with short codes, then grouped into broader themes.
Three themes stood out. Participants found the wording of the FACT-Br more complex than the CPIB, they showed signs of cognitive load and fatigue while completing the questionnaires, and interviewer support was often necessary to make sure responses truly matched what participants meant. Putting the numbers and the quotes together gave a better picture of how people with brain tumor related language difficulties experience these simple check box forms.
Conclusion:
On paper, the story seems straightforward. In this small sample, FACT-Br and CPIB scores were strongly and positively related. If you only looked at the graphs, you might conclude that both tools are working just fine. The interviews tell a more complicated story. Many participants could only get through the FACT-Br because a trained interviewer helped them unpack tricky wording, flipped items, and confusing scales. In contrast, the CPIB felt more natural and less tiring. It’s simple, communication focused language made it easier for people to answer in a way that matched their real experience. This matters because quality of life data is used to make serious decisions. If a survey is hard to understand, especially for people with language impairments, we risk underestimating their struggles or misrepresenting what they are trying to say.
Looking ahead, there are several possible next steps. One would be to design an aphasia friendly version of the FACT-Br, with shorter sentences, clearer scales, and visual supports. Another is to test whether using tools like the CPIB alongside traditional cancer surveys gives a more accurate view of life after a brain tumor. Most of all, this project reminds us that asking good questions is a science in itself. If we want patients’ voices to guide care, we have to make sure the words on the page are truly accessible to them.
Language areas most affected by tumors
Reflection
The Signature Experience course and this brain tumor questionnaire project have pushed me in ways that actually feel connected to what I want to do in the future. Instead of just learning about research from slides, I got to be in the middle of it. I worked with real participants, real data, and a real question that matters for people living with brain tumors and language difficulties.
One of the biggest areas of growth for me was communication. On the science side, I had to read journal articles, write a full research report, and make sense of both statistics and interview transcripts. On the other side, I had to turn that same project into a blog post that my friends, teammates, or family could understand. That part was harder than I expected. It made me slow down and ask, “How would I explain this out loud to someone who has never heard of PROMs or aphasia” I know that being able to switch between technical language and everyday language will be important if I go into medicine or research.
This project also stretched my problem solving skills. With only seven participants and a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, nothing was neat and perfect. I had to interpret Spearman correlations, look at the interview quotes, and notice when the numbers did not fully match what participants were actually saying. It taught me to question my first interpretation and think more deeply about what our tools are really measuring. I also learned a lot about professionalism and teamwork. Working in the aphasia lab meant following protocols, keeping data organized, and respecting participants and their time. Reliability checks, transcription review, and meeting with my mentor all required me to be responsible and prepared, not just for a grade but for the sake of the project and the people in it.
Overall, this Signature Experience helped me see how my interests fit into biomedical science. It brought together brain cancer, communication, quality of life, and equity in who gets heard. The skills I practiced here like critical thinking, clear communication, collaboration, and reflection are all things I know I will carry with me into my future classes, research, and hopefully medical school.
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