About the Author
Carolyn Baylor is a speech-language pathologist whose career has spanned clinical, research, and teaching pursuits. After completing her clinical training, Carolyn worked full time in adult medical settings providing care at the acute care, inpatient rehab, and outpatient rehab levels, as well as supervising trainees. Her primary clinical interests include otolaryngology/head and neck surgery serving adults with voice injuries, head and neck cancer, and related swallowing and communication impairments. Her clinical practice also has included extensive work with adults who have neurologic diagnoses. Motivated by goals to build a teaching and research career, as well as to address challenges she experienced as a clinician in terms of facing resource barriers to taking more holistic, patient-centered approaches to intervention, Carolyn returned to school after several years of clinical practice to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. That is where training in biopsychosocial models of care, qualitative research, and development of patient-reported outcomes provided her with the tools to pursue research and teaching in participation-based intervention. Carolyn advocates for a view of participation-based intervention that is broad and encompasses both traditional skill-based approaches to intervention when called for, as well as broader psychosocial approaches to intervention with considerable emphasis on the communication environment. At the University of Washington, Carolyn has served as Co-Director of the Ph.D. Program in Rehabilitation Science and in the rotating role of Vice Chair of Academic Programs. Her teaching in that department has included co-development and teaching of several Ph.D. seminar courses, an interprofessional education course for students in clinical training that includes four rehabilitation disciplines, and an undergraduate course providing an introduction to rehabilitation professions. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at UW, where her teaching has included graduate courses in clinical methods, voice disorders and intervention, and research methods, as well as undergraduate courses in clinical methods and introduction to acquired communication disorders. She believes that each new trainee brings a wealth of personal experiences, insight, and creativity to their work, and she always enjoys the opportunity to help them prepare for the next steps in their careers. Carolyn's research portfolio focuses on conducting qualitative research to highlight the lived experiences of adults living with communication disabilities, and developing tools to promote patient-centered, participation-based clinical interventions including patient-reported outcome measures and participation-based intervention approaches. She is part of the author team that developed the Communicative Participation Item Bank (CPIB) and its iterations, as well as the Communication Support Questionnaire (CSQ; a measure of social support for communication for adults and their communication partners) and the Levels of Speech Usage (a descriptive scale of daily speech demands). Along with colleagues she developed a Participation-Based Intervention Framework that is applicable across ages and diagnoses, as well as the FRAME model for accessible patient-provider communication in healthcare settings. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Speech-Language Hearing Foundation, and the University of Washington. She deeply values and appreciates the opportunities to collaborate with local, national, and international colleagues both within the profession of speech-language pathology and across different professions. Carolyn's work has been recognized in various ways, including as a three-time recipient of the Editor's Award for the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, a two-time recipient of the Erskine Fellowship from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and recipient of the Kathryn M. Yorkston Award for Mentorship of Ph.D. Students and Trainees from the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. She is a member of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association, the Academy of Neurologic Communication Disorders and Sciences, and the Washington State Speech Language and Hearing Association. In her personal time, she enjoys sightseeing and hiking in nature, reading, baking, road trips, and most of all time spent with her husband and son.