With Yolanda Moses, he co-directs the American Anthropological Association's Public Education Project on Race.
His teaching, research and writing focuses on understanding how poverty, inequality and racism “get under the skin.” He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Goodman was a pre-doctoral research fellow in stress physiology at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm and a postdoctoral fellow in international nutrition at the University of Connecticut and the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition, Mexico.
Goodman has been a professor of anthropology at Hampshire College since 1985.
He is a founding member of the Five College Consortium on "Culture, Health and Science " and currently teaches courses including “Human Variation: Race, Science, and Politics,” and “Sex, Death and Teeth: Life Stories Recorded in Teeth”, “Injustice and Health” and “Nutritional Anthropology.”