Billionaire Brain Scientist Who Is Selling Providence’s “Great Estate” Is Battling DC Neighbors

Billionaire Brain Scientist Who Is Selling Providence’s “Great Estate” Is Battling DC Neighbors

Newton Howard is an enigma. Business Insider calls him a billionaire. Forbes does not. He is in the midst of selling Providence’s most valuable single-family home — which is now on the market for $7.9 million. 

Howard is a scientist's scientist and his CV is 13 pages long and features among other things his 30 U.S. and seven international patents. One of his U.S. patents is titled, "Device for monitoring activities of daily living and physiological parameters to determine a condition and diagnosis of the human brain and body.”

And, while he is selling the so-called Last Great Estate on Providence's East Side, he is battling with his neighbors in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. over his giant Transformers on his property. Yes, giant Transformers — the Hasbro toy.

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Howard’s conflict in DC has attracted both governmental regulatory action and press coverage -- local, national, and even international. In March the DCist first wrote about the dispute.

"The neighborhood commission — ANC 2E, which covers Georgetown, Burleith and Hillandale —unanimously rejected Newton Howard’s request for a permit to keep two large sculptures of the iconic Transformers in front of his $4 million home on Prospect Street NW. They stand just a few blocks from Georgetown University, where he works as a research professor in computational neurology and functional neurosurgery. (That’s brain science for the rest of us.)," wrote the DCist.

Then, NBC and Fox News, the Washington Post, and Business Insider all jumped on the dispute.

Even the Russian-funded news covered the story. Ruptly -- the Berlin, Germany-based news organization bankrolled by Russia -- reported on Howard's neighborhood disagreement.

 

Oxford and Sorbonne Educated -- Future in Providence?

Howard is Oxford-educated and one of the companies he founded is ni2o, Inc., which is “developing a novel, artificial-intelligence driven brain-computer interface to treat a wide range of debilitating neurological disorders and to improve cognitive and athletic performance.”

He has owned at least one other premier property in Providence over the past decade. Before owning the estate on the corner of Rochambeau Avenue and Blackstone Boulevard, he owned 189 Hope Street -- a Victorian mansion.

His bio says that his career spans academia, the U.S. military, and the private sector.  "A prolific scientific author and inventor, he is highly skilled in moving research from the lab to military and commercial applications, including technology you may use daily such as wireless hotspots, Google Earth and Google Translate.”

And there is so much more, he holds advanced degrees in Mathematics (Oxford), Cognitive Informatics (Sorbonne), Neurosurgery (Oxford) and a Doctorate of Medical Sciences (Sorbonne), according to his bio. 

At 45 years of age, it is unclear if the sale of his estate will mean the end of Howard in Providence.

 

Big Brain Science -- Lots of Companies

Beyond teaching at Oxford and Georgetown, Howard has also been a key player at MIT's The Mind Machine Project.

Another bio cites that Howard "has made significant contributions to the fields of neuroscience, linguistics and national defense, including the Physics of Cognition (a mathematical framework for modeling complex medical, economic and security equilibriums), Intention Awareness (a theory for predictive modeling of naturalistic systems), Mood State Indicators (an algorithm to model mental processes involved in human speech to predict emotional states), ADAMA (a method of autonomously identifying and contextually understanding metaphors in language), the Functional Code Unit (a method for translating neurological signaling to logical data structures) and most recently, the Brain Code (a multivariate analytical model designed to extract emergent properties of the brain’s neuronal system)."

While Howard has been educated and has been innovating all over the world and serves on the faculty at both Oxford and Georgetown presently, some of his business and philanthropy interests are registered in Rhode Island.

One of Howard's companies registered in Rhode Island is Object N., LLC -- a company that manages "family office holdings."

Beyond his companies, Howard has also established a foundation that is housed at the Rochambeau Avenue estate. The foundation -- the Howard Brain Science Foundation is led by many of the individuals who serve on the board of one of his companies. 

While Howard is a global innovator and technologist, while he lived and operated in Rhode Island, he did it under the proverbial radar.

Newton Howard, we hardly knew you.

Howard declined to be interviewed for this story.