Following his PhD, Goodacre took up a postdoctoral research position at
Aberystwyth University between 1992 and 1995, and began his own research laboratory in 1995, with the award of a
Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship, which he held until 1999, when he received tenure as a
lecturer in
Microbiology at
Aberystwyth University. He moved to
UMIST, which merged to become the
University of Manchester, first as Reader in Analytical Science (Dept. of Chemistry, 2003–05) and then as Professor of Biological Chemistry, from 2005 to 2018. Goodacre was then recruited to the
University of Liverpool to become Director of the Centre for Metabolomics Research (2018-). Goodacre is the founder and current Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed scientific journal
Metabolomics. He is an Editorial Advisory Board member for the following journals:
Analyst (2014-);
Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis (1997-);
Spectrochimica Acta A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy (2016-). Goodacre is a Founder and Director of the Metabolomics Society (2005–15, 2020–26) and served as President from 2022 to 2024. Since 2008 he is also a Director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum. He served as a Committee member of
Royal Society of Chemistry's Analytical Division Council (2019–22). Since 2019 Goodacre has been a Trustee of the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund (ACTF). Goodacre has supervised, and graduated, 53 PhD, 7 MSc and 2 MPhil postgraduate students. Goodacre is known for innovative science teaching and scholarship, including the incorporation of music into formal lecture schedules, partly to aid mental well-being.
Awards and honours • The
Nils Foss Excellence Prize 2021. •
FACSS Charles Mann Award for Applied Raman Spectroscopy (2021). •
RSC Analytical Division Horizon Prize: Robert Boyle Prize for Analytical Science (2021). • The Analytical Scientist
Power Lists in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023 •
RSC Bioanalytical Chemistry Award (2005). • Recipient of the
Third Professor S. Ramaseshan Distinguished Lecture. AstraZeneca Research Foundation India, Bangalore, India (2004). == Research ==