Ken Howard is a hydrogeologist, certified by the American Institute of Hydrology, chartered by the British Geological Society and registered as a Professional Geoscientist with the Association of Professional Geoscientists of Ontario. He has wide experience in all aspects of aquifer assessement and groundwater resource evaluation, management and protection.

He was elected President of the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) in September 2012 (in 2016 becoming Past-President), and is a Co-Director of the IAH Urban Groundwater Network (IAH-UGN). He was also Director of the Groundwater Research Group at the University of Toronto until hi retirement from the University in 2024. Since the mid-1970's he has worked on numerous applied projects in Canada, UK, the West Indies, Australia and equatorial Africa, publishing articles on topics that range from numerical flow modeling and contaminant migration to environmental isotopes and borehole geophysics. In much of this work, he has focussed special attention on point and non-point sources of groundwater contamination and on the sub-surface transport and modeling of both reactive and non-reactive groundwater constituents. 
 

 

Overseas, regional projects have included the unsustainability of bedrock aquifers of Uganda, the use of fossil groundwaters in the Sahel of Mali and Niger as a means of reducing desertification, and the origin of saline lakes in southeastern Australia. He has also carried out considerable research on the intrusion of saline groundwater into karstic carbonates of the Clarendon Plains, Jamaica and beneath Pacific atolls. Much of his current work is in south-east Asia and involves the the management of aquifers in the Loess Plateau.