Ed-Dee G. Williams. Photo by Caitlin Cunningham for 皇冠官网 Photography.
For the past few years, Ed-Dee G. Williams has been working to design a virtual training program aimed at making it easier for Black youth with autism to seek help for depression from teachers and caregivers.聽
Last summer, he received a two-year, $160,000 grant from the to evaluate the feasibility of the program.聽
Williams, an assistant professor at the Boston College School of Social Work whose research examines the interplay between race and mental illness, was one of a small handful of people in 2024 to receive a grant from the Noonan Fund, which supports research in Greater Boston to improve the quality of life for children with disabilities.
His intervention, created in collaboration with a software company called , uses video and speech recognition to make it seem as though users are having live conversations with teachers who are responding to their statements in real-time.聽
In actuality, users are talking to simulations of teachers, played by actors, who have been given scripts to provide a variety of typical but unpredictable reactions to what they say.聽
At each turn in the conversation, users select a symptom associated with depression, describe that symptom to a video recording of a 鈥渢eacher,鈥� and then receive feedback based on the response.聽
Each conversation is unique, so users can practice honing their conversational skills until they feel ready to share their stories with adults who can help them.聽
Williams envisions a future in which the training program is commercially available to schools, therapists, and parents, and he hopes to adapt the app to meet the needs of other populations, too.聽
鈥淢y goal is that anyone who wants to improve these kinds of conversational skills will be able to access this tool,鈥� he says.
We asked Williams to reflect on the grant that he received from the Noonan Fund to support this work, with an emphasis on how he connected with the organization, what the application process was like, and why other faculty should build partnerships with non-federal sponsors.
Can you describe the study that you鈥檙e conducting with your grant from the Deborah Munroe Noonan Memorial Research Fund?
The Noonan grant is funding the feasibility assessment of my intervention, Asking for Help, a program designed to help Black autistic youth discuss their mental health with teachers and caregivers.聽
In collaboration with a software company called SIMmersion, we developed a simulation that allows users to have back and forth conversations with teachers. The teacher鈥檚 goal is to help users talk about their mental health, especially depression, while giving them the tools to communicate their feelings to their parents.聽
The grant gave us the funding to work with our partners and our community advisory board to recruit Black autistic youth, parents, autism advocates, and other specialists to test the program and provide quantitative and qualitative feedback.
Based on that feedback, SIMmersion made some big adjustments to the program. We knew it was a little wordy. We knew it was a little complicated to use. So we鈥檝e streamlined it, making it simpler to understand, easier to navigate, and prettier to look at. Now we鈥檙e planning to test the new iteration of the program.聽
Did you respond to a specific Request for Applications, or RFA?
Yes. Shortly after I joined Boston College in 2023, Lisa Nowak, senior associate director of corporate & foundation relations at 皇冠官网, contacted me. She was familiar with my research and asked if I had seen this grant opportunity from the Noonan Fund. It was specific to autism, she said, specific to Massachusetts, and she thought it would be a good fit for me.
We were planning to submit an application for an R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health, but receiving a grant from the NIH is always a long shot. So we thought this would be a nice secondary option.聽
What did the application process look like?
I first visited the website for the Noonan Fund to get a sense of other projects that had already been funded. I thought our project would fit in nicely, so I then submitt