Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a global health and development reporter on the Science desk. She was NPR's first Reflect America Fellow, working with shows, desks and podcasts to bring more diverse voices to air and online.
She's a former producer for WBUR/NPR's On Point and was a 2018 Environmental Reporting Fellow with The GroundTruth Project at WCAI in Cape Cod, covering the human impact on climate change. As a freelance audio and digital reporter, Huang's stories on the environment, arts and culture have been 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 was also an adjunct instructor in podcasting and audio journalism at Northeastern University. She worked as a project manager for public artist Ralph Helmick to help plan and execute The Founder's Memorial in Abu Dhabi and with Stoltze Design to tell visual stories through graphic design. 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.
-
A vaccine will only work if a lot of people can get immunized. State health officials are working furiously to design outreach and distribution plans, with little clarity from the federal government. -
NPR has obtained draft documents that indicate the federal government is planning to cut off Medicare funding to hospitals that don't comply with a request to supply daily COVID-19 data.
-
Draft documents obtained by NPR show that the federal government is preparing to enforce new data reporting requirements, threatening to withhold vital Medicare funding from noncompliant hospitals.
-
Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussed on Tuesday who will get the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine when it is available.
-
When a COVID-19 vaccine is approved, who gets first dibs? Bioethicists say the focus should be on saving the lives of people most at risk. Frontline health workers go first, but the rest is trickier.
-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines Friday to say the coronavirus can spread via tiny aerosol particles. But on Monday, the agency abruptly pulled the new guidance.
-
Political interference on COVID-19 guidelines at the CDC, a DHHS spokesman on leave after attacking scientists on facebook live, and the President continues to contradict the science of the pandemic.
-
Trump says a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready by the end of 2020. At the same time, the top communications official at Health and Human Services is going on leave after comments he made on Facebook.
-
Revelations in Rage lead global health specialists to charge that Trump is scapegoating the World Health Organization.
-
There's increasing evidence that the coronavirus can linger and spread through the air in crowded indoor rooms. Researchers say infectious clouds can be dispersed with fresh air.
-
The coronavirus appears to transmit unevenly: A few people can infect many, while others don't pass the virus on at all. Researchers are working to understand the factors that drive superspreading.
-
The Trump administration had promised complete, transparent information on the coronavirus and hospital capacity. Instead, the new system has produced erratic updates and confusing numbers.
