Weitzman Planning PhD Newsletter Spring 2024

What’s new with the Weitzman Planning PhD Students, Candidates, and Recent Alumni?

 

Recent Publications

Albers, Larisa, Christopher J. Rogers, Jane Steinberg, Robert O. Vos, Daniel Soto, Ryan Lee, Jasmine Siyu Wu, and Jennifer B. Unger. “Proximity to cannabis retailers and recent cannabis use among a diverse sample of California adolescents.” Substance Use & Misuse (2023): 1-8. doi.org/10.1080/10826084.2023.2294965

Dong, Xiaoxia, Jasmine Siyu Wu, Elizabeth A. Walshe, Flaura K. Winston, and Megan S. Ryerson. “Residing in a Driver Training Desert leads to Delayed Licensure: Investigating the Relationship between Accessibility to Driver Training and Young Driver’s Licensure” Findings (2023). doi.org/10.32866/001c.85096

Dong, Xiaoxia, Jasmine Siyu Wu, Shane T. Jensen, Elizabeth A. Walshe, Flaura K. Winston, and Megan S. Ryerson. “Financial status and travel time to driving schools as barriers to obtaining a young driver license in a state with comprehensive young driver licensing policy” Accident Analysis and Prevention 191 (2023): 107198. doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2023.107198

Freeman, Lance and Yining Lei. 2023. “An Overview of Affordable Housing in the United States.” Penn IUR Policy Brief. Philadelphia, PA: Penn Institute for Urban Research. https://penniur.upenn.edu/uploads/media/An_Overview_of_Affordable_Housi…

Levinthal, Robert and Weller, R. (2023) “Mega-eco Projects: a global assessment of large-scale ecological initiatives.” Socio-Ecological Practice Research. doi.org/10.1007/s42532-023-00157-7 (To also be featured in a special issue on Nature-based Solutions with Socio-Ecological Practice Research)

Levinthal, Robert and Weller, R. (2023) “The Age of the Mega-eco Project.” Landscape Architecture Magazine. May 13. https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2023/05/18/the-age-of-the-meg…

Rivera-Kumar, Stephanie, Zambrano, A., Barany, A. (2023). Envisioning Latinx Narratives: Exploring Mexican and Honduran Immigrant Perspectives Using Epistemic Networks by Geospatial Location. In: Arastoopour Irgens, G., Knight, S. (eds) Advances in Quantitative Ethnography. ICQE 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1895. Springer, Cham. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47014-1_21

 

Research and Professional Awards

Yining Lei:

• 2024 Columbia GSAPP Incubator Prize (with Aline Estefam)
• 2024 University of Pennsylvania GAPSA Research Student Travel Grant
• 2023 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Case Study Award
• 2023 Real Estate Network Empowering Women (RENEW) Carmen Lee Memorial Scholarship
• 2023 International Association for China Planning (IACP) Urban Digital Transformation and Healthy City Award (with Junteng Zhao)
• 2023 International Association for China Planning (IACP) Conference Travel Award

Robert Levinthal:

• 2024 – Penn Global Research and Engagement Fund Finalist (pending award: requested $150,000 – co-author)
• 2024 – Southeast University (东南大学) x UPENN – Summer Workshop in China
• 2023 – United Nations Environment Programme – Generation Restoration Cities Pilot Cities Competition: “Dakar Greenbelt with Blue-Green Wedges”
• Co-leader and grant writer for a two-year capacity building and catalytic fund ($60,000 USD) to develop a greenbelt and a blue-green infrastructure armature around and inside of Dakar, Senegal.
• Selected as 1 of 8 winning cities from 248 global applicants.

Stephanie Rivera-Kumar:

• 2024 Penn School of Social Policy & Practice Alumni Hall of Fame Inductee
• 2024 Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students 2023 Finalist
• Research Grant Award from the 2024 Penn IUR Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium

Hui Tian: 

• Penn Global Dissertation Grants

 

Patents, Certificates, Fellowships, Board Positions, and Research Affiliations

Travis Decaminada and Yining Lei: 

• Co-Instructors for the 2024 Penn IUR Urban Undergraduate Research Colloquium course (CPLN 5280/URBS 4280)

Rance Graham-Bailey is completing his Master of Science in Social Policy from the School of Social Policy and Practice this summer.

Yining Lei:

• GAPSA PhD Representative, Stuart Weitzman School of Design (2024-2025)
• Research affiliations with Penn Institute for Urban Research, Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and Urban Data Research Lab, Cornell University

Stephanie Rivera-Kumar:

• Listed as an inventor of the Client Management Tool System and Method, Patent No: US-11735294-B2 (issued on Aug 22, 2023)
• Co-Chair for the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition
• Doctoral Consortium at the 2024 Migration and Organizations Conference, funded by the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Initiative at the Wharton School
• 2023-2024 Penn-Birmingham Transatlantic Migration Fellowship Program
• Doctoral Consortium at the International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography 2023, funded by the International Society for Quantitative Ethnography, partially funded by the National Science Foundation
• Research affiliations: Lecturer, MSSP 6290 Research and Evaluation Design in the Penn School of Social Policy and Practice; Research Assistant at the Penn Center for Guaranteed Income Research in the Penn School of Social Policy and Practice; Participated in the International Society for Quantitative Ethnography’s 4th Annual QE Community Data Challenge: QE as a reflective lens on global culture in 2023; Supported the National UnDACAmented Research Project.

Charles Starks is currently finishing the draft of his dissertation, which examines how historic downtown "Chinatowns" have become a distinctive type of living, evolving heritage district in many major cities of Asia and the Americas since the 1970s, using the Chinatowns of Singapore and Vancouver as archetypal case studies. He spent last summer completing his fieldwork in Singapore.

Tiffany M. Tran:

• Certificate in Urban Studies
• CETLI Teaching Certificate
• Research affiliations with Penn EnviroLab, Penn Institute for Urban Research, Department of Architecture, University of Indonesia, and Wharton Real Estate Department

Jasmine Siyu Wu: Federal Highway Administration (FWHA) Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship

Presidential PhD Fellows: Rance Graham-Bailey, Yining Lei, Kimberly Noronha, and Tiffany M. Tran

 

Conferences, Presentations, Guest Lectures, and Exhibits

Yining Lei:

• UAA 2024: Lei, Y. (2024, April 25). Citizen Participation in Public Housing Preservation: Tick Box or Real Change? The Implications of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program in New York City [Conference presentation]. International Conference on Urban Affairs. New York, NY, USA.
• ACSP 2023:
  • Zhao, J. & Lei, Y. (2023, October 21). The Delayed Growth of China’s Health Impact Assessment: Disentangling Causes from Different Disciplines [Conference presentation]. 2023 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Conference. Chicago, IL, USA.
  • Panelist for the Pre-Doctoral Workshop for Underrepresented Students of Color and LGBTQIA+ Students.
• IACP 2023:
  • Zhao, J. & Lei, Y. (2023, July 1). The Delayed Growth of China’s Health Impact Assessment: Disentangling Causes from Different Disciplines [Conference presentation]. 2023 International Association for China Planning (IACP) Conference, Tianjin, China.
  • Chair for the Health, Zoning, and Governance Session.

Robert Levinthal:

• 2024 – “Mega-eco Projects, Design with Nature Now, and China” as an Invited Speaker of Southeastern University, Nanjing, China (Pending).
• 2024 – “Urban Mega-eco Projects and Sao Paulo,” as an Invited Guest of Sao Paulo’s Fundacao Florestal, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• 2023 – “Lessons Learned from Mega-eco Projects,” as an Expert Panelist for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Generation Restoration Cities Workshop, Paris, France.
• 2023 – “Local Stakeholders, Workforce, and Leadership Perceptions of the Great Green Wall in Senegal,” Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference, Chicago, United States
• 2023 – “The Mega-eco Symposium,” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States.
• Hosted, co-led, fundraised, managed, and organized a $52,000, 1.5-day symposium featuring esteemed guests working on 10 large-scale ecological restoration initiatives.
• 2023 – “Our Beautiful Broken World,” Urban Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, Richard Weller and Rob Levinthal (with assistance from Weijing Wang and Xinge Zhang), Shanghai, China.
• 2023 – “Mega-eco Projects: Emergence of Landscape-scale Nature-based Solution,” LAF Symposium and Awards Dinner: LAF Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership, Washington DC, United States.

Stephanie Rivera-Kumar:

• Presented “Mexican Immigrants Strengthening Philadelphia: A Transnational Mixed Methods Approach” at the Penn Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Graduate Student Research Symposium in Philadelphia, PA.
• Presented “Envisioning Latinx Narratives in Philadelphia: Exploring Immigrant Perspectives Using Epistemic Networks by Geospatial Location” at the International Conference on Urban Affairs in New York, New York.
• Presented “Mapping Mexican Immigrants’ Relationship to Economic Development in South Philadelphia Using Conventional Research Methods and Instagram” at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning 2023 Annual Conference in Chicago, IL.
• Presented “Envisioning Latinx Narratives: Exploring Mexican and Honduran Immigrant Perspectives Using Epistemic Networks by Geospatial Locations at the International Conference on Quantitative Ethnography 2023 in Melbourne, Australia.
• Presented “Exploring Latinx Transnationalism in Philadelphia: Populations and Restaurants” at the Penn IUR Urban Doctoral Symposium in Philadelphia, PA.

Charles Starks:

• Presented research on the socio-spatial reconfiguration of Singapore's Chinatown at the Urban History Association's conference in Pittsburgh.
• Spoke at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Seattle on the spatial and placemaking qualities of Pink Dot, the annual LGBTQ rights event that takes place in a historic park in Singapore's Chinatown.

Hui Tian :

• “The Potential of Mitigating Urban Heat Island with Vacant Lands in Philadelphia.” The 42nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture 2022 (ACADIA), Philadelphia (Presentation)
• “Predicting Salinization of Monitoring Wells under Sea Level Rise Scenarios with Machine Learning Models.” The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting 2023, San Francisco (Poster)
• “Predicting Salinization of Groundwater under Sea Level Rise Scenarios with Machine Learning Models." Krueckeberg Doctoral Conference 2024, New Brunswick (Presentation)

Tiffany M. Tran:

• Tran, T. M. (2024, April 25). Estimates of informal land reclamation from a pilot study of Cirebon City, Indonesia [Poster presentation]. International Conference on Urban Affairs. New York, NY, USA.
• Tran, T. M. (2024, April 5). Estimates of informal land reclamation from a pilot study of Cirebon City, Indonesia [Conference presentation]. Krueckeberg Doctoral Conference. New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
• Tran, T. M. (2023, October 21). Expanding Nusantara: Toward a theory of informal land reclamation [Conference presentation]. Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Conference. Chicago, IL, USA.
• Tran, T. M. (2024, February 15). Changing water into land: Understanding informal land reclamation in Maritime Southeast Asia [Guest lecture]. YSS4283 Southeast Asia Urban Planning and Design Practicum. Yale-NUS College, Singapore.
• Tran, T. M. (2023, July 14). Pre-dissertation research on coastal land reclamation [Guest lecture]. Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Engineering. Nahdlatul Ulama University, Ternate City, Indonesia.
• Tran, T. M. (2023, July 10). Urban informality and urban poverty in Southeast Asian cities [Guest lecture]. Department of Urban and Regional Planning. Hasanuddin University, Makassar City, Indonesia.

Jasmine Siyu Wu:

• 103rd Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. “Financial Status and Travel Time to Driving Schools as Barriers to Obtaining A Young Driver License” In-Person (poster). January 9, 2024.
• 103rd Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting (Lectern Session: Innovations in Understanding Crash Risk Across the Life Span). “The Role of the Built Environment, Roadway Characteristics, and Socioeconomic Factors in Keeping Teen Drivers Safe: An Investigation of the Factors most Related to Teen Driver Fatalities” In-Person (lectern). January 8, 2024.
• Safety21 University Transportation Center Deployment Partner Consortium. “Financial Status and Travel Time to Driving Schools as Barriers to Obtaining A Young Driver License” In-Person (poster). November 16, 2023.

 

Visit the Weitzman Planning PhD Doctoral Community webpage for a full list of current students and candidates.