Gökhan Özertan earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University in 1994 and obtained his PhD in Agricultural Economics from Texas A&M University in 2001. He was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at Boğaziçi University between 2001-2025 while serving as the department head between 2018-2020 and 2023-2025. Throughout his career, he has held visiting positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston (2009–2010) and the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (2016–2017).

Gökhan Özertan has led projects funded by EU PRIMA, TÜBİTAK, various Turkish ministries, UNDP, FAO, the World Bank, and the UK Prosperity Fund. In 2019, he participated in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cochran Fellowship Program. Additionally, he served as the rapporteur for the Copyrights Section of Turkey’s Eleventh Development Plan. Gökhan Özertan served as the Chairman of the Working Group of the IV. Agricultural Council in 2025. Currently, he is a member of TÜSİAD's Food, Beverage, and Agriculture Working Group and Turkish Statistical Institute's Agricultural Census Academic Board. Previously, he was a member of Türkiye İş Bankası Agricultural Banking Advisory Board.

His research focuses on modeling agricultural and environmental processes, the role of technology use in agriculture, the impacts of climate change, commodity price dynamics, governance of agricultural cooperatives, and the economic implications of intellectual property rights and regulations in the IT sector.

He teaches microeconomics, statistics, econometrics, economics of innovation, agricultural economics, and environmental economics at both undergraduate and graduate levels.