Pien Huang

  • Wanyu Zhang / NPR

Pien Huang is 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.

Zika: Researchers Are Learning More About The Long-Term Consequences For Children

By • Oct 9, 2019

In 2015, Zika virus swept through Brazil and the Americas. It was the first time a mosquito-borne virus was known to cause severe birth defects, and the World Health Organization declared it a "public health emergency that warranted a global response."

Birds Are Trying To Adapt To Climate Change — But Is It Too Little, Too Late?

By • Jul 26, 2019

Viktoriia Radchuk, an evolutionary ecologist at Berlin's Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, wanted to know how animals were responding to climate change.

So she scoured the results of more than 10,000 animal studies — on species from frogs to snakes, from insects to birds to mammals — looking for information on how changing environments were affecting animal behavior. Based on the available data, she decided to focus on birds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mistrust And Lack Of Genetic Diversity Slow Gains In Precision Medicine

By • Jul 25, 2019

Precision medicine is the field of dreams for human health. Drugs and treatments that would take into account a person's individual DNA configurations, as well as lifestyle and environment, would presumably be better tailored to each person's needs. Still, while the goal of precision medicine is to help everybody, the current research available has a major flaw. It's largely based on the genes of people who are predominantly of white and European descent.

I Spy, Via Spy Satellite: Melting Himalayan Glaciers

By • Jun 19, 2019

The world's glaciers are melting faster than before, but it still takes decades to see changes that are happening at a glacial pace.