Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a reporter on the Science desk, covering public health and health disparities. She also guest hosts on NPR news programs, and narrates the Moments in History series on the NPR One app.
She joined NPR in 2019 as the newsroom's first Reflect America Fellow, working with shows, desks and podcasts to bring more diverse voices to air and online. Her reporting, with NPR's visuals team, on tracking COVID-19 data won a 2022 Edward R. Murrow award.
She's a former producer for WBUR/NPR's On Point and a 2018 Environmental Reporting Fellow with The GroundTruth Project at WCAI in Cape Cod, covering the human impact on climate change. As a freelance reporter, Huang's stories on the environment, arts and culture were featured on NPR, the BBC and PRI's The World.
Huang's experiences span categories and continents. She was executive producer of Data Made to Matter, a podcast from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and has taught podcasting and audio journalism at Northeastern University.
In a detour from journalism, she worked as a project manager for public artist Ralph Helmick to help plan and execute The Founder's Memorial in Abu Dhabi. Huang has traveled with scientists looking for signs of environmental change in Cameroon's frogs, in Panama's plants and in the ocean water off the ice edge of Antarctica. She has a degree in environmental science and public policy from Harvard.
-
Research published in the journal Science illuminates a "missing piece" in the biological understanding of profound autism and offers new targets for drug development. -
The elephantnose fish is native to Africa and a darling of neuroscientists, for its specialized cerebellum-like brain. Scientists have mapped the neurons in a part of the brain that senses electrical signals in detail, and found that how it filters out electrical noise is more complex than they thought.
-
After more than a decade, UCSF scientists have mapped around 100 varied genes associated with profound autism to a smaller set of biological pathways, offering a promising path for developing drugs.
-
Schwartz takes command of a public health agency that has lost thousands of employees amid layoffs, resignations and leadership turmoil. -
Cyclospora, the parasite that has sickened thousands this summer in the U.S., requires time in the human digestive tract to reproduce. -
Trump's nominee faces the Senate health committee for her confirmation hearing on July 15. If confirmed, she will lead an agency dealing with workforce and leadership shortages and new layers of political review. -
At the Lake Lucerne summit, U.S. and Iranian officials are trying to keep a shaky peace effort alive after renewed violence and confusion over Hormuz. Former Ambassador Ryan Crocker talks about the need for strategic patience.
-
What makes a dad movie? Two NPR movie-loving fathers talk about the classics and the films they hope their children will love.
-
Why do some butterflies live for months while others survive only weeks? Tufts University researcher Jessica Foley explains what Heliconius butterflies can teach us about aging.
-
Iran says it has closed the Strait of Hormuz again. The U.S. military says traffic is still flowing. NPR's Jane Arraf reports from Beirut.
