2023 Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium Information Session

Please join course instructors Diana Negron and Chris Quattro for a drop-in information session on the Spring 2023 Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium (UURC) at the Penn IUR Conference Room, Meyerson Hall, G-12.

The Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium {UURC) is a semester-long, credit-bearing seminar that includes $2,000 of funding support for a joint research project with a faculty or doctoral student mentor. Students from all four Penn undergraduate schools are eligible to participate. UURC student-faculty collaborations have yielded publications in refereed journals, leveraged other research funding, and prepared undergraduates to pursue original research at the graduate level. This is a great opportunity for undergraduate students to conduct real-world urban research. 

There is no advanced registration required. Lunch will be provided.

Below are some of the projects available for this year’s UURC undergraduate students! Links to each mentor’s biographies are also included.

If you are interested in these projects, would like to know what other projects are available, or have any additional inquiries, please e-mail cmquat@upenn.edu or dpnegron@upenn.edu.

Amber Mackey (Political Science): This project is a mixed-method study focusing on public policy’s relationship to race & ethnicity politics, seeking to understand how state policies discuss or omit race across different policy domains. The students will be introduced to some techniques for text and content analysis. There will also be opportunities to learn about web scraping and collecting data with R (a statistical analysis program.

Kimberly Noronha (City Planning): The student will collect and analyze available electronic archives related to the origin of the settlement of Fort Kochi in India, including maps, photographs, and administrative documents to help answer the question of how the settlement of Fort Kochi originated and evolved. This work spans urban planning, geography, sociology, and political economy.

Tiffany Tran (City Planning): Between January and August 2022, researchers at the Asian Development Bank conducted sample surveys in the Indonesian cities of Pontianak and Semarang to assess urban livability across 25 indicators. As the research team focused on only key indicators in both cities, most of the data has yet to be cleaned, explored, and analyzed. This study will examine the livability of these cities and present results through data visualizations. (Knowledge of Indonesian Language Required).

Shengxiao (Alex) Li (UC Riverside): This project explores transportation difficulties of older adults. It includes analysis of their use of ride-hailing, medical considerations, technology use, and changes during the pandemic using data analysis.

Jay Arzu (City Planning): This work will study the benefits and process of highway removal, including alternative forms of transportation, using community based research and data analysis.

Stephanie Rivera Fenniri (City and Regional Planning): This project will focus on how Latinx immigrants from the Global South, specifically immigrants arriving from Mexico and Central America, create positive economic, cultural, political, and social impacts in U.S. cities and regions. This work will include mixed methods research analyzing and mapping Latinx population and labor data on ArcGIS, R, and/or coding interviews with Latinx immigrants.