Goodacre joined the University of Oxford as a research fellow in 1999. She was a research fellow at the University of East Anglia from 2002. She was described by the BBC as Spider Woman. , Goodacre is based at the University of Nottingham, where she founded the SpiderLab in 2007 and leads the ArachNotts research group. As a geneticist, Goodacre studies the evolution, population and conservation of spiders. She monitored the mating behaviour and sex ratio of the linyphiid spider Pityohyphantes phrygianus with Bengt Gunnarsson at the University of Gothenburg. She also studied the silk of Mygalomorphae spiders and the genetic diversity of spider silk genes and found evidence for antimicrobial activity in the silk of common house spiders. She found that Erigone atra, a pest controlling spider, uses long-distance airborne dispersal. Goodacre contributed to the 2011 book Spider Physiology and Behaviour: Physiology. In 2015 Goodacre reported that spiders could survive "sailing" across oceans.
