Dr. Howard’s research has concentrated on developing instrumentation to reveal the constantly evolving solar corona and the transient events thrown off by the Sun – the coronal mass ejection (CME), which drive the major geomagnetic storms on Earth. In addition to a significant effort to understand the CME phenomena, he has studied other phenomena such as coronal streamers, sun-grazing comets and asteroids, interplanetary dust and the variability of the solar brightness.

Dr. Howard is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and was the recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s George Ellery Hale Prize, NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and the NRL Lifetime Achievement Award. He was an Editor for the Journal of Geophysical Research, a member of the National Research Council Committee to establish a Decadal Strategy for Solar and Space Physics.