GPASC Summer Grants 2026

We are pleased to announce the two recipients of GPASC Summer Grants for 2026: Lucy Chamberlain and Chuyue Wang. Lucy Chamberlain is a student at the University of Pennsylvania double-majoring in East Asian Languages and Civilizations: Chinese and Urban Studies (with a concentration in City and Transportation Planning). The title of her project is:  "From Timeliness to Experience: Comparing Rider Priorities in SEPTA Metro’s L (Market-Frankford) and B (Broad Street) Lines and the Taipei Metro." Chuyue (Steven) Wang is also a student at UPenn, double-majoring in Mathematical Economics and Computer Science. His project is titled: "Sustaining and Expanding the Yijian zhi Scholarship Database: A Public Index of English-Language Research on Hong Mai's Record of the Listener." Both recipients will submit reports after the summer and present their projects at the GPASC Annual Undergraduate Conference in April 2027. Their project descriptions are presented below. 

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Lucy Chamberlain, "From Timeliness to Experience: Comparing Rider Priorities in SEPTA Metro’s L (Market-Frankford) and B (Broad Street) Lines and the Taipei Metro."

Urban Research’s Undergraduate Urban Research Colloquium, a semester-long course, analyzes rider emotions and willingness to pay for on-time arrival of SEPTA Metro L (Market-Frankford) and B (Broad Street) lines. This project takes the stance that reliable public transit information plays a critical role in shaping riders’ sense of control and comfort during their commute. In many other American transit systems, real-time arrival data is accessible online, allowing riders to plan trips before reaching the station. In Philadelphia, however, SEPTA provides no real-time arrival information for SEPTA Metro through its app or through Google/Apple Maps. Additionally, the L is the only Metro line where riders can sometimes access real-time arrival predictions at the platform. The B offers no real-time information on platforms or online. 

SEPTA's lack of uniform, consistent real-time information for L and B lines presented an unusual and understudied opportunity to study how real-time information at the platform shapes riders’ perceived sense of control over their commute and their emotional responses during either delays or uncertainty. A Qualtrics survey that I designed and created under the guidance of Assistant Professor Xiaoxia Dong has discerned the likelihood of riders being willing to pay for wait time reduction of SEPTA L and B lines. Once baseline reliability is achieved, rider priorities shift from timeliness to experiential dimensions such as comfort, accessibility, and perceived control. By comparing SEPTA Metro L and B lines and the Taipei Metro, this study tests the broader meaning of “good” transit service. 

Research regarding the SEPTA Metro L and B lines identifies rider emotions and willingness to pay when reliability is inconsistent. And, the Taipei Metro is a logical progression in research; interviewing riders of the system would give perspective into what passengers desire once reliability and on-time arrival is no longer the main focus. Taipei Metro in-person interviews would serve as a comparative benchmark, allowing this study to identify how rider needs shift from concerns about predictability and control to considerations of accessibility, comfort, and overall quality of experience. Together, SEPTA Metro and Taipei Metro data would illustrate two different stories documenting transit rider priorities, showing that while reliability is foundational for a working public transportation agency, it is not sufficient to fully meet rider needs. 

This project would grant me the opportunity to apply knowledge from my East Asian Languages and Civilizations: Chinese and Urban Studies majors, and leverage my ACTFL-certified Advanced Low Mandarin proficiency to investigate how cities globally can collaborate and learn from each other to improve the well-being of all people and ensure sustainability of urban life into the future. 

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Chuyue Wang, "Sustaining and Expanding the Yijian zhi Scholarship Database: A Public Index of English-Language Research on Homg Mai's Record of the Listener."

I am the lead developer of the Yijian zhi Scholarship Database, a trilingual (English / TraditionalChinese / Simplified Chinese) web application that indexes English-language scholarship on Hong Mai’s (1123–1202) Yijian zhi (夷堅志, Record of the Listener) — the largest survivingcollection of zhiguai (志怪, “anomaly account”) tales from imperial China and a primary source

for the social, religious, and cultural history of the Southern Song. The database is built for the research group of Prof. Hsiao-Wen Cheng (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania).

The database currently holds 2,745 indexed stories keyed to the 17 surviving sections of the Yijian zhi (Zhonghua shuju 1981 critical edition); 110 Song-dynasty locations with coordinates sourced from Harvard’s China Historical GIS (CHGIS) and visualized on an interactive Leaflet map; Also, it maintains an auditable schema linking every scholarly work to the stories and

keywords it discusses and carefully documents the information for research like who indexed it, page range, notes.

The application supports unified Chinese–English search with Traditional/Simplified variant expansion (OpenCC), role-based editing with full activity logging, BibTeX / Chicago / CSV export, and a guest-researcher mode so the index is openly browsable by scholars worldwide.