She was a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and Edwin H. Murty Professor of Engineering, before leaving academia to join Google Research.
[1][2] She completed her Ph.D. there in 1990, with the dissertation Learning Binary Relations, Total Orders, and Read-Once Formulas supervised by Ron Rivest.
[3] As a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis, she became Edwin H. Murty Professor of Engineering[1][2] before leaving academia in 2008 to work for Google Research.
[2][4] Goldman was married to Kenneth J. Goldman,[2] also a computer scientist from St. Louis with whom she went to Brown and MIT;[1] he also became a faculty member at Washington University and a researcher for Google.
[6] Goldman is the coauthor, with Ken Goldman, of an undergraduate textbook, A Practical Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms using Java (CRC Press, 2007).