Dudley Goodhead was Director of the Medical Research Council Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell, Oxfordshire, until September 2003. He gained his D Phil at the University of Oxford in 1965 in particle physics and then went on to academic positions at the Universities of California, London (St Bartholomew's) and Natal.

He joined the MRC Radiobiology Unit at Harwell in 1974. Professor Goodhead has served on a variety of national and international committees on evaluation of radiation risks. These have included the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE, 1986 - 1997), the BEIR VI radon-risk assessment in the USA, consultancies to UNSCEAR and IAEA, and Working Groups of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, on carcinogenic risk of gamma rays and neutrons and of some internally deposited radionuclides) and The Royal Society (on depleted uranium). His own research has been mainly on the biophysics of ionizing-radiation effects with particular emphasis on microscopic features of radiation track structure.