Arpit Gupta Selected for UC Presidential Faculty Fellows Program

Associate Professor Arpit Gupta has been selected as a UC Presidential Faculty Fellow through the UC Washington Center. The program brings together a small group of faculty from across the UC system each year to work directly with federal policymakers in Washington, D.C. The inaugural 2025 cohort included seven fellows representing all ten UC campuses.

Gupta’s research focuses on building independent data infrastructure for broadband policymaking. His team developed the Broadband-Plan Querying Tool (BQT), which measures broadband availability and affordability at the level of individual street addresses by directly querying internet service provider websites. This approach addresses a long-standing issue in broadband governance, where public programs have often relied on provider-reported data that is difficult to verify.

Using BQT, his group audited more than 500,000 federally subsidized addresses and found that only 55% could actually obtain service, with just 33% meeting the FCC’s speed and price benchmarks. The work has already informed policy discussions at multiple levels, including legislative analysis for the Virginia Joint Commission on Technology and Science, regulatory proceedings at the California Public Utilities Commission, and an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a 2026 fellow, Gupta will spend a week in Washington, D.C. (May 17–22) meeting with federal stakeholders, including the NTIA, congressional staff, and the FCC. These discussions will focus on refining this data infrastructure and aligning it with the needs of policymakers overseeing the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Gupta recently outlined the broader vision for this work in a Benton Institute essay, “What We Can’t See, We Can’t Fix” (https://www.benton.org/blog/what-we-cant-see-we-cant-fix).