Dr. Elliot Goodman was born and bred in London and educated at the University of Cambridge.  After one year of postgraduate training in Cambridge and London, he moved to the United States in 1990. He trained as a general surgeon at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York from 1990 to 1996. During this period of training, he spent two years as a research fellow at Columbia University. 

After spending some time as a trauma fellow at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn, Dr. Goodman joined the faculty of the New Jersey Medical School. After two-and-a-half years in New Jersey, Dr. Goodman moved to Montefiore Medical Center (in the Bronx, New York) where he became Chief of Bariatric Surgery. After a successful four-and-a half year tenure at Montefiore, Goodman was recruited by Beth Israel Medical Center to become their Chief of Bariatric Surgery in 2004. He was a busy general and gastrointestinal surgeon at Beth Israel until it became part of the Mount Sinai Health System in 2013. 

After engagements at the new Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Mount Sinai Brooklyn hospitals as Head of House Staff, Associate Chief of Surgery and Vice-Chair for Surgical Quality, he was appointed in January 2022 as Associate Director for Systems Quality and Performance in Surgery for the whole 8-hospital Mount Sinai Health System.

In October 2022, he joined the faculty of the City University of New York School of Medicine as the Director of Surgical and Anatomic Education and the Co-Director of the Organ Systems curriculum. He holds the academic title of Professor of Medical Sciences. As the Director of Anatomic Education, he has established a Virtual Reality (VR) research laboratory investigating the utility of VR in the anatomic education of students and residents and in the surgical treatment of patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Goodman is a visiting professor at Ben-Gurion University, Bar Ilan University (both in Israel) and EDU (in Malta).  He is the North American co-ordinator for the global surgical community TUGSS (The Upper Gastro-intestinal Surgeons Society). 

Dr. Goodman lives with his wife, (most of his) seven children and his seven grandchildren in New York City.