Dr. Daniel S. Goldberg is trained as an attorney, an historian, and a public health ethicist. He uses methods drawing primarily from public health law, public health ethics, and the history of public health (focusing on 19th and early 20th c. US).

His specific areas of expertise include the social determinants of health and health inequities, structural violence and health, chronic illness and noncommunicable disease, and structural stigma. He has studied chronic pain for 15 years and has focused much of his recent work on using legal and policy mechanisms to ameliorate structural stigma. He has also developed a research program using tools from the emerging discipline of legal epidemiology to advance health justice.

Finally, he has a line of research on conflicts of interest as a population health hazard, regulatory capture as governance failure, and the manufacture of doubt. Most recently, he has applied these lenses to problems of traumatic brain injury and collision sports.