Professor Howard came to Purdue University in 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies. She holds her MLS from IUPUI and B.S. in Organizational Leadership & Supervision from Purdue University. She has developed and presented specialized courses and workshops on the use of business information in the areas of Management, Marketing, Career Research, Agriculture Economics, Hospitality and Tourism Management, Mechanical Engineering, and Entrepreneurship. In addition to her teaching, she also works closely with the Student Soybean Innovation Competition, consulting with the competing teams on how to conduct market research for their inventions. 

Professor Howard was honored in 2017 with ATG Media's "Up and Comers" Award, and in 2018 with The Special Libraries Association Business & Finance Division Award for Achievement in Business Librarianship, and was a recipient of Purdue's Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship Award. In 2019 she received the Purdue University Exceptional Early Career Award. In 2013, she co-founded the Indianapolis Literary Pub Crawl, an annual fundraising event in support of adult literacy in central Indiana.

She has authored publications on the gender pay gap in academic libraries, predatory journals, teaching evidence-based decision-making, the library experience of first-year undergraduate students, libraries and social media, and business research competencies.