Emily Kwong
Emily Kwong (she/her) is the founding reporter and now co-host for Short Wave. Emily is also the host and co-creator of Inheriting.
Four days a week, Kwong and the talented team of Short Wave share new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. A breakout hit among science podcasts, Short Wave met a crucial need for science-based information during the Coronavirus pandemic and won the 2021 Ambie Award for Best Knowledge, Science or Tech Podcast.
Inheriting is an AAPI family history podcast produced by LAist Studios and distributed by the NPR Network. Co-created with Anjuli Sastry Krbechek, the first season spanned 80 years of history through the eyes of seven families. Kwong and the team developed a trauma-informed editorial process, built around the families' questions. Inheriting reached hundreds of thousands of people across 10 episodes and a live show, many inspired to dig into their family histories. Inheriting was funded entirely by individual donors in a groundbreaking model driven by listener support. The first season won the 2025 Ambie Award for best society and culture podcast, the Signal Award for Best History Podcast (Silver) and the 2025 RFK Journalism Award in radio.
Before joining NPR, Kwong was a reporter and host at KCAW-Sitka, a community radio station in Sitka, Alaska. She covered local government and community news, chasing stories onto fishing boats and up volcanoes. Her work earned multiple awards from the Alaska Press Club and Alaska Broadcasters Association. Prior to that, Kwong taught and produced youth media with WNYC's Radio Rookies and The Modern Story in Hyderabad, India.
Kwong won the Best New Artist Award in 2013 from the Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition for a story about a Maine journalist learning to speak with an electrolarynx. She was NPR's 2018 Above the Fray Fellow and reported a three-part series on climate change and internal migration in Mongolia. Her team's multimedia narrative, "Losing the Eternal Blue Sky," won a White House News Photographers Association award in 2020.
Kwong's reporting style is driven by empathy and context — a desire to slow down and spend time. There is a sense of people being real people, and of their lives continuing on after the story ends. She is proud to have interviewed both of her parents, shining a light on mental health for StoryCorps with her mom and heritage languages for NPR's "Where We Come From" series with her dad.
Kwong has committed her 15-year career to building equitable workplace cultures. She served as the first co-lead of NPR AZNs, the employee resource group for (ERG) that supports over 100 staff members who identify as Asian, Asian-American and/or Pacific Islander. Since 2022, Kwong has been the co-president of the board for the Association for Independents in Radio (AIR), an organization for independent audio storytellers. She was a AIR New Voices scholar in 2015. She learned the finer points of cutting tape at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in 2013.
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NPR's science podcast Short Wave looks at the secrets behind scorpions' weapons, using electricity to measure the quality of a cup of coffee, and what shapes the content of dreams.
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NPR's Emily Kwong speaks to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is still calling for a vote on a war powers resolution following a wave of U.S.- and Israel-led airstrikes on Iran. -
NPR's Mia Venkat explains what the internet was obsessed with this week: the jazzy jingles made by content creator Romeo.
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Emily Kwong and Regina Barber of NPR's Short Wave podcast talk about the mysterious structure of ice, parents' heightened tolerance for disgust, and how penguins are adapting to climate change.
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Regina Barber and Emily Kwong of Short Wave talk about spider web architecture, storytelling and memory, and why more TV pixels may not translate to a better viewing experience.
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Movies can tell us a lot about what scares us. And ever since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fear of nuclear war has reverberated across decades of film. -
The oceanic "twilight zone" lies deep, and teems with life. We look at how this mysterious zone affects climate change.
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In this first glimpse of the "Sea Camp" series from NPR's Short Wave podcast, hear how climate change will significantly shift three-quarters of the ocean's surface currents by the end of the century.
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NPR's Emily Kwong speaks with former Education Secretary John B. King Jr. about the dismantling of the education department and recent arrests of international scholars. -
It doesn't matter how full you are, you can always fit in a bite or two or three of pie and ice cream. Scientists say it has to due with special neurons in our brain that just can't get enough sugar.
