Michael Edward "Mike" Goddard FAA FRS is a professorial fellow in animal genetics at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

[1][2][3][4] Goddard was educated at the University of Melbourne where he was awarded Bachelor of Veterinary Science (BVSc) and PhD degrees.

He co-proposed and developed 'genomic selection' in which dense molecular markers are fitted to quantitative data by using linkage disequilibrium with QTL, thereby enabling more accurate selection decisions, including among animals without phenotypic records.

Within a decade, it is being used world wide in animal improvement programmes and has potential in plant breeding and prediction of risk of genetic disease in humans.

Goddard has made other major contributions to understanding the genetic basis of quantitative genetic variation, showing that common SNPs can collectively account for much of the heritability, and to inferences on population history.