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 National Institutes of Health is sunsetting its influential COVID-19 treatment guidelines, used by millions of doctors to guide care during the pandemic.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, who brought mindfulness meditation into mainstream medical settings, discusses how the centering practice can help with some of today's widespread social problems.
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The agency is replacing its COVID-specific guidance with general guidance for respiratory viruses that says people should stay home when they are sick.
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The state has at least 10 cases of the illness to date but the state's surgeon general has not called for vaccinations or quarantining of exposed kids. This goes against science-based measures.
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The current guidance advises five days of isolation. Unnamed health officials have indicated that this guidance may soon go away, a move that troubles public health experts.
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An elementary school in Florida, credits daily mindfulness lessons with helping students cope with stress — and turning the school around academically. The lessons are delivered through an app.
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Flu is rising, and COVID levels are higher than last season's peak. But COVID hospitalizations and deaths are down. Nonetheless, COVID is still the most dangerous virus circulating.
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This was the year a lot people finally exhaled. The pandemic was declared no longer an emergency. But viral threats are still with us and there are lessons we still haven't learned.
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Experts warn that new tropical viruses are headed for the U.S. – and the country should take active measures to fend them off.
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A CDC analysis of 2022 data finds that U.S. life expectancy is improving after being knocked backwards during the COVID emergency. But it's still lower than it was pre-pandemic.