Howard joined the College in 1998 after serving as a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University where he was awarded the University's Faculty Excellence Award in 1996. In 1999, Howard was awarded the Rose and George Doval Award for Excellence in Nursing Education from New York University. Howard’s primary focus is gerontological mental health nursing and he is certified as a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Adult Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing. In addition to publishing extensively in Rogerian Nursing Science, he has a deep interest in advancing nursing theory-based education, research and practice. He developed Unitary Field Pattern Portrait Research Method, an interpretive research method developed within Rogers' Science of Unitary Human Beings. His areas of research include: Alzheimer Disease family caregiving; testing the effectiveness of structured written emotional disclosure (journaling) as meaning-making intervention for promoting psychological and physiological health; and mild syndromes of depression and dispiritedness in later life. Howard also has expertise in intervention testing research as well as qualitative research methods including: phenomenology, hermeneutics, thematic analysis, and ethnomethodology. Howard is a former John A. Hartford Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Postdoctoral Scholar (2002-2004) and his research has been funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Program, the National Institute of Nursing Research, Iowa Informatics Initiative, the Cancer and Aging Program, and the University of Iowa Geriatric Nursing Intervention Research Center to study the effect of structured written emotional disclosure on facilitating meaning making, reducing caregiver burden, and promoting health in family caregivers of persons with Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Howard is on the Executive Board of the Center for Nursing Classification & Clinical Effectiveness and is a Co-Editor of the NIC: Nursing Intervention Classification (5th Edition) published in 2008. PhD in Nursing Science, University of South Carolina MScN in Psych/Mental Health Nursing, University of Toronto BSN, Thomas Jefferson University BS in Biology, Lebanon Valley College
Articles
Caregivers' deepest feelings in living with Alzheimer's disease: A ricoeurian interpretation of family caregivers journals (with Heide C. Bursch), Research in Gerontological Nursing (2012)
The 2010 Doris Schwartz Gerontological Nursing Research Award: Kathleen Coen Buckwalter, Phd, RN, FAAN (with L. Skemp), Journal of Gerontological Nursing (2012)
The effect of written emotional expression on reducing stress in cancer family caregivers (with Heide C. Bursch and Yelena Perkhounkova), Gerontologist (2010)
Living in the doldrums: The lived experience of dispiritedness in later life (with M. L. McGonigal-Kenney), Research in Gerontological Nursing (2010)
This phenomenological investigation sought to enhance understanding of the experience of dispiritedness by providing a...
Portraits of caregivers of end-stage dementia patients receiving hospice care (with S. Sanders, P. Swails, and J. Power), Death Studies (2009)
The purpose of this study was to investigate how caregivers respond to the end stages...