During the 1960s, Goad turned his attention from physics to biology and he is best known for his contributions to the founding of GenBank, the most widely used repository for DNA sequence data.
[1] Graduating in the spring of 1945, Goad was assigned to a Navy ship in Manila just as World War II was coming to an end.
The following year he transferred to Duke University where he began to work on a PhD in cosmic ray physics under the supervision of Lothar Nordheim.
Although Goad was ostensibly at Los Alamos to finish his thesis on cosmic rays, he soon became involved in the hydrogen bomb work, making some important contributions.
Goad assembled a group of young physicists – including Temple Smith, Myron Stein, Mike Waterman, William Beyer, and Minoru Kanehisa – to work on mathematical problems involved with sequence comparison and analysis.
In 1982, a 5-year $2 million contract to establish and operate the GenBank database was awarded to Goad and his co-workers at Los Alamos (working jointly with Bolt, Beranek, and Newman).