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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An independent vaccine advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met to discuss and vote on vaccine policy for the first time since the change in administrations. -
For the first time since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary, vaccine advisers to the CDC are meeting to discuss vaccines for RSV, HPV, COVID and more. -
The reduction in force comes along with a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services, consolidating 28 divisions to 15. -
A tour of a grow facility in Maryland reveals the wide variety of scents from different cannabis strains. -
Dr. Dave Weldon, Trump's pick for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was withdrawn from consideration shortly before a scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. -
In its first 50 days, the Trump administration made sweeping changes to scientific arms of the government like the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. The president issued executive orders to terminate all work that was related to DEI, environmental justice and gender inclusivity. In response, research was halted and thousands of people were fired — some of which was reversed. It's a lot to keep track of, so we called in reinforcements. Here to recount it all and analyze what these ongoing changes mean for the future of scientific research in the United States are NPR science correspondents Rob Stein, Pien Huang and Jonathan Lambert. Want to hear more about policy changes affecting science? Let us know by emailing shortwave@npr.org! We're also always open to other story ideas you have.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
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The Health Secretary's assertion inaccurately characterizes the 2009 government report he cites, according to an NPR review and interviews with former committee members. -
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., suggests that 97% of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee members have conflicts of interests. His assertion inaccurately characterizes the report he cites.
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Some employees who were previously fired received emails saying they're "cleared to return to work." -
It's the first measles death in the U.S. since 2015. More than 130 people in west Texas and New Mexico have been sickened in the outbreak so far.