About

Howard is Chief Experience Officer at Syndesis, a company bringing clinical data about all people on Earth into the world of medical research, which for over 150 years has depended solely on clinical data from American and European patients to drive all scientific and medical discovery.

Howard is also president & design director at Heliotrope, a company focused on data experience design and immersive visualization for economics, genomics, and other fields requiring interaction with very complex data sets. Heliotrope is also pursuing the use of VR and immersive experience design in scientific research, drug development, financial services and other fields.

From 2011 to August 2019 Howard was a Group Creative Director at Publicis Sapient, as well as North American Practice Lead for Data Visualization at Sapient. He focused on experience design & strategy, innovation design, data visualization, design thinking and service design for Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, The New York Stock Exchange, Pfizer, Macquarie, Merck and many others.

Before Sapient, as an independent consultant and as a Managing Director of User Experience at Scient, Howard led experience strategy and design projects for The Museum of Modern Art, The Hermitage Museum, The History Channel, and others.

From 2005 to 2011 he was founder & president of Tacitus, a company focused on design and development of data viz software in genomics. The suite of software, called BioSprockets, employed video game technology and immersive 3D for biological pathway analysis. It could best be described as "XBox for scientists," providing researchers with the capability to enter game-like environments to analyze the relationship between genes and proteins for cancer research.

With a talented team of game developers, 3D designers, postdocs in biology, as well as prominent scientists and genetic researchers across the U.S., Tacitus developed a new approach to the complex problem of analyzing gene-protein data.

As a result of his work at Tacitus, Howard served on two panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) helping to assess and award grants in ground-breaking data visualization as applied to cancer research.

Howard is a published novelist and has written non-fiction for The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. His illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and several magazines and newspapers. He has illustrated several books, including NPR’s ‘Science Friday’ host Ira Flatow’s “Rainbows, Curve Balls and Other Mysteries of Science”.

Howard is also a 3D designer and artist who primarily works in ZBrush and Blender.