Österberg was born in Göteborg, Sweden in 1958, and spent his early years in Trollhättan.
He was on the faculty of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College from 1990 to 2009, during which time he was a recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award from NSF.
He received patents on signal encryption methodology[6] using wavelet transforms, and co-founded Lightkey Optical Components, LLC.
[7] In 2009, he moved to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and was inducted into Norges Tekniske VitenskapsAcademi (NTVA), a science and technology organization dating from 1955.
[9] He is an adjunct faculty member at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.