Joanna Goodey's areas of expertise with respect to the FRA’s work include: victims of crime; hate crime; trafficking in human beings; quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, including surveys.From the mid-1990s she held lectureships in criminology and criminal justice, first in the Law Faculty at the University of Sheffield and subsequently at the University of Leeds. She was a research fellow for two years at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and has been a consultant to the UN International Narcotics Control Board. She was also a regular study fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg.

She studied criminology, as well as human geography, and is the author of the academic textbook ‘Victims and Victimology: Research, Policy and Practice’ (2005), and co-editor of the book, together with A. Crawford, on ‘Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice: International Perspectives’ (2000). To date, she has published over thirty academic journal articles and book chapters.