Work — Marcela M. Gómez, PhD

Fungibility2013 – 2019

Why spectrum markets stay illiquid

Every wireless signal — calls, Wi-Fi, broadcast — rides on the radio spectrum, but no two slices are alike: a frequency built for long-distance reach behaves nothing like one meant for crowded urban use, and you can't simply swap one for the other. I was among the first to pin down, and measure, how that lack of interchangeability chokes the liquidity of secondary spectrum markets.

Earlier research had mostly waved the problem away, treating spectrum as if any piece could stand in for any other. I showed that it can't, quantified the cost, and handed regulators a usable rule of thumb: build several narrow markets for comparable bands rather than one catch-all market for everything.

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, 5(2), 2019 · TPRC 2013 · open-source agent-based model

3.5 GHz band2014 – 2020

Virtualization as a way to make spectrum tradable

If the trouble is that spectrum units aren't interchangeable, virtualization is a way around it — wrapping raw spectrum and network capacity in standardized, software-defined units, the same move cloud computing uses to turn hardware into rentable, on-demand power.

As one of the approach's principal developers, I built a market-driven, agent-based framework for allocating those units and a full model of how a secondary market in virtualized connectivity would behave — and showed, across scenarios including the 3.5 GHz band, that it produces markets that actually function.

IEEE Systems Journal, 14(1), 2019 · Telecommunications Policy, 44(10), 2020 · Best Student Paper, Pacific Telecommunications Council, 2016

1695–1710 MHz2017 – present

Can spectrum govern itself?

The default assumption is that some central authority has to hand out and police spectrum rights. I asked the contrarian question: what if the users coordinated it themselves, the way communities have long stewarded shared resources like fisheries and common grazing land?

Borrowing from Nobel-recognized work on governing the commons, I was one of the few to bring that institutional lens to spectrum, and among the first to build and test an agent-based model of automated enforcement. I also helped pioneer blockchain and smart contracts as practical machinery for sharing and enforcing spectrum use.

Journal of Institutional Economics, 16(6), 2020 · IEEE Communications Magazine, 61(2), 2022 · McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020

Matching markets2017 – 2020

The middleman makes the market

Spectrum trading is usually framed as an auction problem — yet auctions alone don't tell you why some markets flourish and others never start. Off the trading floor, when buyers and sellers can't find one another, a trusted broker bridges the gap. I asked whether that same move could rescue spectrum markets.

I was the first to import matching-market and intermediary theory into this area, building a simulation around a deferred-acceptance match — the algorithm family behind pairing medical residents to hospitals. More brokers meant more providers got access; stronger reputations drew more partners; and the whole arrangement lowered the wall facing small and first-time entrants.

TPRC 2017 · GLOBECOM 2020 · 47th TPRC 2019

Applied · AI2023 – present

AI-enabled analytics for a research university

A research university moves well over a billion dollars of work a year, yet the data describing it is strewn across systems that don't talk to each other, so no one can see the whole. I was the first to hold a research-analytics post at the University of Pittsburgh, and I built that capability from the ground up.

That meant a Snowflake research-data environment that made cross-unit analysis possible for the first time; the Research Discovery Tool, an AI service built with partner Quantiphi that pairs researchers for team science; and the Pitt Research Analytics hub, where a natural-language AI fields questions about research activity on the spot.

Research Analytics Summit, 2025 · NORDP, 2023 · invention disclosure under review

ServiceOngoing

Shaping the field, and the next generation

I also help run the field and judge its work: Program Committee Chair for TPRC, the leading international telecom-policy conference; reviewer for a dozen-plus IEEE, Elsevier, and Springer journals; and a director on national research boards including IRIS and TPRC. I've also helped choose Fulbright grantees in Ecuador.

And I teach — Responsible Data Science, to well over a hundred graduate students from around the world each term, shaping how the next cohort handles data with rigor and care.