In October, Barbara Howard ’75 joined the ranks of Johns Hopkins medical luminaries who have received the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP’s) C. Anderson Aldrich Award for outstanding contributions to developmental and behavioral pediatrics.

Howard was honored for her four decades of work as one of the most popular — and beloved — teachers and innovators of care for developmentally and behaviorally challenged pediatric patients.

Previous Aldrich Award recipients from Johns Hopkins include such legends as Leo Kanner (1894–1981), the first physician in the United States to be identified as a child psychiatrist and the first to describe the symptoms of autism. Also honored have been Leon Eisenberg (1922–2009), a protégé of Kanner’s who was renowned as an advocate for children with disabilities, and Edith Jackson ’21 (1895–1977), another pioneer in the field.

After earning her M.D. from Johns Hopkins, Howard trained at Harvard with another Aldrich Award winner, T. Berry Brazelton, before returning to Johns Hopkins to head the Center for Teenaged Parents and Their Infants (1979–82), and direct the Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Fellowship.

Howard also is a co-founder of CHADIS (Comprehensive Health and Decision Information System), which, among other services, provides online pre-visit questionnaires that enable physicians to collect patient-generated data to formulate clinical decisions and prepare quality improvement reports, according to the CHADIS website.

Howard has taught a continuing medical education course, Pediatrics for the Practitioner, for some 35 years, and has shared her wisdom about practical approaches to developmental and behavioral aspects of pediatrics through a regular column in the free Pediatric News over the past two decades. She now offers a monthly webinar for free continuing medical education credits. A prolific lecturer, Howard once was cited by the AAP as the highest-rated speaker of any specialty in pediatrics.