Gerhard studied electronic Engineering at Dresden University of Technology and finished his degree in 2006. The topic of his thesis was about "Modelladaptive Regelung einer doppelt gespeisten Asynchronmaschine in Windkraftanlagen". Shortly afterwards, he started to work for Prof. Doru Lupascu at the IfWW to build up a test rig for temperature treatment for ferroelectric devices. Then he started a PhD in the field of organic solar cells using small molecules and carbon nanotubes.

In January 2009, he joined the group of Prof. Gianaurelio Cuniberti as an external collaborator of Prof. Lupascu (now at University Duisburg - Essen) in a joint project with the IKTS (Fraunhofer Institut Keramische Technologien und Systeme) and continues the experimental work in the organic solar cell field.