[2] He undertook a large volume of research on coastal engineering problems, and developed methods for the design of monolithic breakwaters.

Goda was instrumental in the move to characterise the behaviour of sea waves as a stochastic process, involving spectral and statistical analysis, which began to be gradually incorporated into coastal engineering during the 1970s and 1980s.

After graduating in Civil Engineering from The University of Tokyo in 1957, he joined the Port and Harbour Research Institute (PHRI) of the Japanese Ministry of Transport.

[2][9] In 1961, he was selected as part of a Japanese government initiative to conduct hydraulic and coastal research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, under the guidance of Professor Arthur T. Ippen.

[24][25] In 2007, he gave a keynote lecture at the 9th International Summer Symposium of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers in Yokohama,[26] and delivered the keynote lecture entitled Coastal Protection Planning against Sea Level Rise at the 9th International Conference on Coasts, Ports, and Marine Structures (ICOMPAS) in Tehran in 2010.

[38] In 2003, he published a set of workable formulas for simplified wind-wave prediction, based on previous work by the South African engineer Basil Wrigley Wilson and other Japanese researchers,[39][40][41][42] to be utilised by engineers for preliminary design work.

[44] Goda had previously published work on similar historical themes, including a paper in 1999 in which he analysed the historical development of the mathematical theory of waves, and traced the development of coastal engineering from Leonardo da Vinci up to the present day.