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.
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New research on ancient human remains suggests the habitual usage of betel nuts, a plant seed with mind-affecting properties that is popular in parts of Asia despite the health risks it presents. -
Neuroscientists have made a major advance in modeling the human brain in mice, offering a new way to study conditions like cerebral palsy. Ethicists ask if it changes how these mice should be treated. -
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.
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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. -
Public health officials acknowledge they need to shed paternalistic messaging if they want to reach more people. The nominee to run the CDC says she will strike a new tone.
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Dr. Erica Schwartz answered questions from a Senate committee Wednesday, as she sought confirmation to become the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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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. -
Health officials and researchers hope that efforts to control deer populations, which serve as "party buses" for mating ticks, can reverse the tide of ticks and the illnesses they cause.
