Gerald studied electrical and information engineering at the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Munich, Germany, with a concentration in information and communication technology. For his PhD he researched distributed, self-organizing routing protocols and network architectures for the Next Generation Internet and developed novel concepts and algorithms for their optimized operation.

In 2010 Gerald started as researcher for the next generation mobile core network in DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, working on improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) and efficiency of mobile networks. He represented DOCOMO Euro-Labs in the European research projects MEDIEVAL and SAIL, where partners from academia and industry worked to optimize mobile networks for multimedia services and scalable/adaptive solutions for a next generation transport network respectively.

Since 2014, he has been leading DOCOMO Euro-Labs' standardization team which is active in the areas of Machine-Type-Communications (MTC), Software-defined Networking (SDN), 5th Generation Mobile Networks (5G), and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In the latter topic, Gerald is participating in OPNFV project with a concentration on the topics Doctor (Fault Management) and Promise (Resource Reservation).