He received his doctorate from Moscow State University in 1983, did postdoctoral work UT Southwestern Medical Center, and held the position of the Director and then Vice President of Research at Integrated Genomics in 1999-2003. Dr. Osterman is one of the founders of the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes (FIG), a nonprofit research organization that launched the Project to Annotate 1,000 Genomes in 2003. FIG provides the open-source integration of all publicly available genomes and tools for their comparative analysis, annotation, and metabolic reconstruction.