Goodacre was born in Changi, Singapore, and was educated from 1978 at the Monmouth School, in Wales, where he went on to study Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics at 'A' level. He received a 2i-class honours degree in Microbiology from the University of Bristol, where he was a student at Badock Hall Halls of residence at the University of Bristol, and remained to study for a PhD in pyrolysis-MS for bacterial identification[3] with the bacteriologist Dr Roger Berkeley at the University of Bristol,[4] defending his thesis in 1992. While in Bristol he met his wife: they married in 1991, celebrating 30 years of marriage in 2021, and have one daughter.
Roy Goodacre taking Raman measurements from pigments in Aboriginal Rock Art, Australia[5]
Following his PhD, Goodacre took up a postdoctoral research position at Aberystwyth University between 1992 and 1995, and began his own research laboratory in 1995, with the award of a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship, which he held until 1999, when he received tenure as a lecturerinMicrobiologyatAberystwyth University. He moved to UMIST, which merged to become the University of Manchester, first as Reader in Analytical Science (Dept. of Chemistry, 2003–05) and then as Professor of Biological Chemistry, from 2005 to 2018. Goodacre was then recruited to the University of Liverpool to become Director of the Centre for Metabolomics Research (2018-).[6]
Goodacre is a Founder and Director of the Metabolomics Society (2005–15, 2020–25) and currently its President.[8][failed verification] Since 2008 he is also a Director of the Metabolic Profiling Forum.
Since 2019 Goodacre has been a Trustee of the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund (ACTF).[10]
Goodacre has supervised, and graduated, 53 PhD, 7 MSc and 2 MPhil postgraduate students.[11][12]
Goodacre is known for innovative science teaching and scholarship, including the incorporation of music into formal lecture schedules, partly to aid mental well-being.[13]
Goodacre started Metabolomics research in the early 2000s with Douglas Kell.[21] He helped to develop long-term metabolomics which allows fusion of GC-MS and LC-MS data collected over 12–24 months - which is based on mathematical corrections which effectively removes any (unavoidable) chromatographic and mass spectrometry instrumental drift.[22] This approach has been applied to generate profiles from ~1200 normal human serum samples[23] and to investigate human frailty in ageing populations of approx. 2000 individuals.[24]
Standardisation in Metabolomics is important and Goodacre was part of the Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI)[25][26] which help establish metabolite identification reporting standards,[27] which have been very well adopted by the field. He chaired part of the MSI's data analysis workgroup and these minimum reporting standards were published.[28]
As of 2020, Goodacre has authored two international patents,[31][32] published over 400 peer-reviewed research articles and has an H-index of over 100 (see Google Scholar),[33] and edited two books on metabolomics.[34][35]
^Goodacre R, Vaidyanathan S, Dunn WB, Harrigan GG, Kell DB (2004). "Metabolomics by numbers: acquiring and understanding global metabolite data". Trends in Biotechnology. 2 (5): 245–252. doi:10.1016/j.tibtech.2004.03.007. PMID15109811.
^Dunn WB, Lin W, Broadhurst D, Begley P, Brown M, Zelena E, Vaughan AA, Halsall A, Harding N, Knowles JD, Francis-McIntyre S, Tseng A, Ellis DI, OHagan S, Aarons G, Benjamin B, Chew-Graham S, Moseley C, Potter P, Winder CL, Potts C, Thornton P, McWhirter C, Zubair M, Pan M, Burns A, Cruickshank JK, Jayson GC, Purandare N, Wu FC, Finn JD, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Wilson ID, Goodacre R, Kell DB (2015). "Molecular phenotyping of a UK population: defining the human serum metabolome". Metabolomics. 11 (1): 9–26. doi:10.1007/s11306-014-0707-1. PMC4289517. PMID25598764.
^Goodacre R, Kell DB (1999), Composition analysis: WO9642058, US5946640
^Goodacre R, Upton M (2013), A method of analysing a sample including a microorganism of interest: PCTGB2015050551, EP3110963A1, WO2015128650A1, US20170073725A1
^Harrigan GG, Goodacre R (2003). "Metabolic Profiling: Its Role in Biomarker Discovery and Gene Function Analysis". Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston: 335. ISBN978-1-4615-0333-0.
^Vaidyanathan S, Harrigan GG, Goodacre R (2005). Metabolome analyses: strategies for systems biology. Boston: Springer. p. 383. ISBN978-0-387-25240-7.
