Professor Goldys is Deputy Director of the flagship interdisciplinary ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale Biophotonics (CNBP) in which the ARC investment of $23,000 000 has been matched by funding from academic and commercial partners of $17,000 000 (2014 – 2021). At the Centre, she is responsible for partnerships, knowledge transfer and research commercialisation. The CNBP program has led to 15 industry-funded projects including five in industry-partnered translation, and it leveraged additional $ 155,000 000 of external funding. It also gave rise to three spinoff companies and has achieved 11 translational research outcomes, with nine more planned by 2020.

Goldys established and led the $2,000 000 ARC/NHMRC Network “Fluorescence Applications in Biotechnology and Life Sciences” (FABLS, 2004 – 2009), a major organisation of some 600 members from the academia and 49 from industry in Australia and internationally. Its key purpose was fostering of interdisciplinary research and development of linkages between industry and academia. FABLS grew research capacity of the fluorescence research community by supporting in excess of 100 research projects, valued at over $ 1,000 000.

Professor Goldys has also been a long-term International Member of Photonics4Life (a key European consortium in Biophotonics), the Center for Commercialisation of Fluorescence Technologies, University of North Texas and several EU COST actions. She founded the Optical Characterisation Facility at Macquarie University (over $2M investment), supported by NCRIS (Characterisation).  With global leaders of the biophotonics research community (B. Wilson, P. French, L. D.  Matthews, J. Popp, F. Pavone), and contributed to the setting up an international roadmap for Biophotonics, and to the preparation of the OSA White Paper "Label-free Optical Techniques for Biomedical Diagnostics and Imaging: Challenges and Opportunities for Clinical Translation".

Professor Goldys initiated and chaired 11 conferences including international meetings: SPIE "Biophotonics Australasia" (Adelaide, 2016), “Light in Life Sciences Conference”, (Melbourne, 2009) and  “Biophotonics in Australia-Showcase and Strategic Planning”, (Sydney,2006).  She has been Committee Member of over 20 meetings in Australia and internationally and co-organised over 30 international meetings. She is Track Chair for Nanobiophotonics and Conference Chair at BIOS, the world's largest international biomedical optics meeting and part of SPIE's Photonics West .

Professor Goldys has a career total of 315 publications (2019), and her h-index is 41. She is a regular invited speaker with 50+ invited talks at conferences. 

Professor Goldys’ foundational achievement in the area of advanced imaging is the establishment of a novel analytical method of non-invasive, label-free autofluorescence (AF) characterisation. The method provides a collective metabolic "fingerprint" which can be used to distinguish healthy from diseased cells in a variety of disease conditions, including cancer, diabetes and motor neurone disease. This research attracted a Eureka award in 2016 for Innovative Use of Technology, and multiple, externally funded research partnerships. This technology is now being translated to various clinical and industry end-users.

For over a decade Professor Goldys has been leading Australian research efforts centred on the development of fluorescent and luminescent nanomaterials for biological applications. She introduced a suite of nanomaterials for high contrast, background-free imaging using time-gating. She led research efforts to increase brightness of such nanoparticles using advanced approaches ranging from core-shell design to plasmonics, published in prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society Advanced Materials and Advanced Functional Materials. Her work concerning upconversion in lanthanide-doped Gd₂O₃ nanoparticles has set the scene for major international activities in nanoscale upconversion, which continue to this day. Her highly internationally visible studies of upconversion in NaYF₄ nanoparticles introduced theoretical modelling to understand the fundamental relation between nanoparticle size and the lifetime of upconversion emission. Subsequent to this work, the applications of upconverting nanoparticles were extended to single particle sensing, high level multiplexing, and rare event detection, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, and Nature Communications.