
Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a health 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.
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The updated recommendations seek to course correct after guidelines from 2016 were criticized for harshly limiting access to needed pain medication.
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About half of U.S. adults get their flu shot each year, but a new report finds that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans are less likely to get a flu vaccine — and more likely to be hospitalized.
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Early fears of an escalating outbreak have not come to pass. Scientists are finding that the virus needs a very particular set of circumstances to spread effectively.
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New daily monkeypox cases have been falling, and the CDC says cases are probably going to plateau or decline over the next few weeks.
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In the first congressional hearing on monkeypox, federal officials were criticized for being slow to act, and struggling to apply the lessons of the pandemic to the current outbreak.
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Congress held its hearing on the federal response to the monkeypox outbreak. That comes as cases — and vaccinations — slow down in the U.S.
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Dr. Demetre Daskalakis is steering the U.S. monkeypox response. A month into the job, he sees signs of success, but there's still more to be done.
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Data shows that a disproportionate number of people who contract monkeypox are also HIV positive. Researchers are trying to figure out the reason.
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Rates of new cases are declining in major cities, suggesting public health campaigns are working. But the spread
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All summer, NPR's Science Desk has been looking at sweat. Humans are covered with millions of sweat glands, but it wasn't always that way. When did humans start to sweat?