Pien Huang

  • Wanyu Zhang / NPR

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.

Bats Carry Many Viruses. So Why Don't They Get Sick?

By • Feb 9, 2020

Like Ebola virus in Africa and the Nipah virus in Asia, the new coronavirus — 2019-nCoV — appears to have originated in bats.

Chinese researchers took samples of the coronavirus from patients in Wuhan, the city in central China where the outbreak was first detected.

They compared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus — 2019-nCoV — to a library of known viruses and found a 96% match with a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in southwest China. The findings were published in a study in Nature this week.

Why Dengue Fever Cases Are Hitting Record Highs In Latin America

By • Dec 17, 2019

2019 is a record year for dengue fever in Latin America. The mosquito-borne disease has surged across the continent, from Mexico down to Chile and Argentina, with nearly 3 million cases reported.

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.

Florida's Corals Are Dying Off, But It's Not All Due To Climate Change, Study Says

By • Jul 16, 2019

Brian Lapointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, has spent his career studying corals at the Looe Key Reef, in a National Marine Sanctuary in the Florida Keys.

Over that time, he's witnessed an alarming trend. In the past 20 years, half of Florida corals have died off.

I Spy, Via Spy Satellite: Melting Himalayan Glaciers

By • Jun 20, 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.