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Untangling the facts from the fiction of what ride hailing apps like Uber mean to cities and their public transit systems is providing lots of avenues to pursue for economist Jonathan Hall.

One thing is certain at this point, he says, Uber is “not the big bad wolf” that some make it out to be. It’s more complicated than that.

That’s why Hall, who’s in his second year as an assistant professor in the University of Toronto's economics department, is collecting data from dozens of cities in the United States, from Tacoma to Tallahassee and most major points in between — except, of course, for Austin, Texas, which Uber and another service left abruptly in May after voters rejected a proposal to allow the companies to self-regulate their drivers.

His research, which seeks to answer whether Uber, a global juggernaut now available in 477 cities on six continents, is a substitute or complement to public transit, is receiving support from the .

The annual awards are provided to assistant professors within the first five years of a tenured-stream academic appointment to help them establish strong research programs. This year the fund is awarding a total of $966,000 to 63 researchers across a range of disciplines. See below for a full list of recipients.

“The award is a vote of confidence in my work,” says Hall (pictured at right) who will use the funding to hire a graduate student to help him plow through the data.

He hopes to have his first paper on the topic ready for publications within the next three to four months but has at least eight more ideas that could keep him deep in Uber research for close to a decade. He’d also like to include Canadian data at some point.

“The Connaught New Researcher Award is not only a recognition of excellence, it’s also an investment that speaks to the University’s belief in the vital research projects being established here and their potential for growth and impact,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation. 

“By investing internal funds in the projects being carried out by these newly appointed U of T researchers now, we aim to help them get their programs to a point where they are in a position to secure external funding to continue and expand their research down the road. Congratulations to this year’s winners on their well-deserved achievement.”

Researching the impact of Uber is important on a number of fronts, Hall argues. In some cities, the company seems to complement existing public transit systems, with suburbanites using the service to get to stations to take transit into the city’s downtown, or late at night when transit service is infrequent or has shut down.

His research might also help explain why there was in 2015 in several Canadian cities. Some have pointed to Uber as an exacerbating factor but the claims are anecdotal at best without data.

Looking into the future and the next big transportation disruption looming on the horizon, Hall says Uber use patterns may also help predict the impact of driverless vehicles on traffic in our cities.

In addition to Hall, the recipients of this year’s Connaught New Researcher Award are:

• Pat Akey of U of T Mississauga’s department of management for “Policy uncertainty, firms, and financial markets”
• Natalie Bau of U of T Mississauga’s department of economics for “Affirmative action and student effort”
• Tyson Beach of the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education for “Biomechanical analyses of single-leg squat variations – Implications for lower extremity injury risk assessments”
• Christoph Becker of the Faculty of Information for the “The sustainability debt of software design projects”
• Laurie Bertram of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of history for “The other Little House: Brothel culture, race, and the colonization of the Canadian Prairies, 1870-1910”
• Laura Brown of U of T Mississauga’s department of geography for “Monitoring and Modelling Lake Ice in Canada”
• Daphna Buchsbaum of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of psychology for “What is unique about the human mind? Investigating the role of social information and physical knowledge in the origins of causal reasoning and problem solving”
• Lydia Burke of OISE's department of curriculum, teaching and learning for “Minority middle school student engagement in public science: A qualitative analysis of factors influencing participation”
• Brett Caraway of U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communications, Culture, Information and Technology for “Connective action in social movement research”
• Boris Chrubasik of U of T Mississauga’s department of historical studies for “Sanctuaries and empires in the eastern Mediterranean (400 BCE-100CE)”
• Andre Cire of U of T Scabrorough’s department of management for “Decision analytics for home health care”
• Kristin Cleverley of the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing for “Transitions from child to adult mental health services: A qualitative study of youth experiences”
• Peter Cziraki of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of economics for “CEO immobility”
• Craig Dale of the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing for “Advancing patient-oriented outcomes in oral hygiene: Experiences and recommendations of critical care survivors”
• Sebastian Dyrda of U of T Mississauga’s department of economics for “Taxes, regulations of businesses and evolution of income inequality in the U.S.”
• Alexander Ensminger of the Faculty of Medicine's department of biochemistry for “Leveraging an unexplored model to define intrinsic design specifications for CRISPR-Cas adaptation”
• Xing Fan of the Faculty of Arts & Science's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies for “New politics of classical performance: China’s National Theatre after the Cultural Revolution, 1976-2016”
• Mohsen Ghafghazi of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering's department of civil engineering for “Replicating river deposition environment for investigating the influence of fabric on mechanical response ofalluvial soils”
• Melissa Gniadek of U of T Mississauga’s department of English and drama for “Unsettled spaces, unsettled stories: Temporalities of settlement in 19th-century American literature”
• Andrey Golubov of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management for “The efficiency of the takeover market”
• Sidhartha Goyal of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of physics for “Understanding heterogeneous populations: microbes to stem cells”
• Nicolas Grisouard of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of physics for “Bridging the gap between wave scattering theory and satellite oceanography”
• Jiaying Gu of U of T Mississauga’s department of economics for “Heterogeneous treatment effect and selective instrumental variable regression”
• Sara Guilcher of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy for “Polypharmacy among community-dwelling persons with spinal cord injury in Ontario: Optimizing medication management”
• Robert Haslhofer of U of T Scarborough’s department of computer and mathematical sciences for “Mean curvature flow and Willmore flow”
• Jacob Hirsh of U of T Mississauga’s department of management for “Increasing employee engagement by making work more meaningful”
• Mitchell Hoffman of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management for “Bringing economics to the workplace: What do managers do?”
• Cendri Hutcherson of U of T Scarborough’s department of psychology for “Tracking the dynamics of attention and inhibition during dietary self-control”
• Brian Jacobson of the Faculty of Arts & Science's Cinema Studies Institute for “Film, power, and persuasion in the era of energy uncertainty”
• Peter Landry of U of T Mississauga’s department of management for “Developing neuroeconomic theories of decision making”
• Yao Luo of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of economics for “Competition and pricing in the Canadian wireless market”
• Julie MacArthur of U of T Mississauga’s department of historical studies for “Radical cartographies: Mapping sovereignty, belonging and dissent in Eastern Africa, 1950-76”
• Neda Maghbouleh of U of T Mississauga’s department of sociology for “Civic engagement in Toronto ‘mothers’ groups”
• Donald Luke Mahler of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of ecology and evolutionary biology for “Reconstructing a natural macroevolutionary experiment through phylogenetic study of a diverse tropical lizard clade”
• Loren Martin of U of T Mississauga’s department of psychology for “Understanding chronic pain-induced depression by linking stress, inhibition and behavioural changes”
• Nicole Mideo of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of ecology and evolutionary biology for “The importance of ecology for understanding and detecting the evolution of drug resistance”
• Brent Miles of the Faculty of Arts & Science's Centre for Medieval Studies for “The literature of biblical kingship in medieval Ireland: A critical edition of the Sermo ad Reges ‘Sermon to Kings’ and the Teacusc Rigda Solam ‘The Royal Teaching of Solomon’”
• Daniel Moore of the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education for “Novel methods to study protein metabolism in humans”
• Cosmin Munteanu of U of T Mississauga’s Institute of Communications, Culture, Information and Technology for “Improving the online safety of older Canadian adults: Understanding and removing barriers to technology adoption and increased online participation”
• Elise Paradis of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy for “The state of the union: Mapping evolving professional stereotypes and clinical reasoning of pharmacy and medicine students in a time of regulatory upheaval”
• Keith Pardee of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy for “The creation of hardware interfaces for practical applications of cell-free synthetic biology”
• Brady Peters of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design for “Designing sound scattering surfaces”
• Ludovic Rheault of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of political science for “Emotion and policy-making in the Canadian House of Commons”
• Gonzalo Romero Yanez of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management for “Simple near-optimal policies for a class of subsidy allocation problems”
• Sophie Rousseaux of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of chemistry for “A sustainable strategy for the direct nucleophilic substitution of aliphatic alcohols”
• Sara Saljoughi of U of T Scarborough’s department of English for “Burning visions: The counter-cinema of the Iranian new wave”
• Daniel Santa Mina of the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education for “Mixed-modality exercise for men with prostate cancer on active surveillance”
• Emily Satterthwaite of the Faculty of Law for “Optional taxation: A study of the GST/HST small supplier election”
• Robert Schertzer of U of T Scarborough’s department of political science for “The politics of national identity and diversity”
• Joshua Barton Scott of U of T Misissauga’s department of historical studies for “Oceanic associations: liberalism and Hindu reform across the British Empire”
• Mikko Taipale of the Faculty of Medicine's Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research for “Systematic phenotyping of Mendelian disease alleles”
• Julie Teichroeb of U of T Scarborough’s department of anthropology for “The influence of resource quality and usurpability on vervet monkey foraging decisions”
• Andras Tilcsik of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management for “Whitened résumés: Race and self-presentation in the labour market”
• Miglena Todorova of OISE's department of social justice education for “Violence against university women: Post-socialist and transnational perspectives”
• Doug VanderLaan of U of T Mississauga’s department of psychology for “Children’s appraisals of gender nonconformity: A comparison of reactions based on verbal report vs. facial emotional expression”
• Marcelo Vieta of OISE's department of leadership, higher and adult education for “Recalling the past, recuperating the workplace: Collective memory and learning-in-struggle at worker-recuperated enterprises”
• Tamas Bence Viola of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of anthropology for “Neanderthals and Denisovans in Central Asia”
• Amar Vutha of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of physics for “Development of efficient single-photon detectors in the infrared”
• Audrey Walton of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of English for “New wine in old skins: Early medieval theory of language and the invention of vernacular literature”
• Rosalie Wang of the Faculty of Medicine's department of occupational science and occupational therapy for “Preparation for a multi-site randomized controlled trial of the AIRR robotic system in a program for upper limb therapy post-stroke”
• Michael Widener of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of geography and planning for “Grocery Stores, time budgets and travel costs: Accounting for space and time when measuring access to healthy retail food stores”
• Debra Wunch of the Faculty of Arts & Science's department of physics for “Ensuring consistent inter-city greenhouse gas emissions measurements in North America”