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Postdoctoral Scholar
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
The Ohio State University
Frederick Howard, PhD, is a medical anthropologist specializing in the social determinants of health, healthcare accessibility, and Indigenous health sovereignty. He currently serves as a Postdoctoral Scholar within the Division of Dental Public Health at The Ohio State University College of Dentistry. In this capacity, he applies qualitative methodologies to interdisciplinary inquiries into oral health disparities, focusing on the sociocultural dimensions of dental disease, fluoride hesitancy, and oral health fatalism.
Dr. Howard’s doctoral research, No Refuge in Return, provides an ethnographic analysis of how Oglala Lakota veterans navigate the bifurcated healthcare landscapes of the Veterans Health Administration and the Indian Health Service. His work situates these individual care trajectories within broader systemic frameworks, including institutional bureaucracy, land fractionation, and tribal-state jurisdictional consultations.
He holds a PhD from The New School for Social Research and an MA in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Bridging critical theory with pragmatic public health applications, Dr. Howard’s scholarship examines the structural delivery and contestation of care through rigorous longitudinal fieldwork.