Since May 2022, Gern has been named senior vice president of engineering and managing director for Torc Europe at the Technology and Software Development Center in Stuttgart, Germany. Gern joins the Torc team after serving as the chief technology officer for the Daimler Truck Autonomous Technology Group, where he had a leading role in the technological strategy for the company’s SAE-Level-4 autonomous truck development. Initially, Gern was on the Daimler Truck team that investigated autonomous driving partnerships that led to the successful 2019 acquisition of a majority stake in Torc. After serving as vice president of Autonomous Driving North America in Sunnyvale, California, for Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Gern joined Daimler Truck in 2018 as the technical project lead, Autonomous Trucks. Earlier he joined what was then Daimler AG in 1998 as a research and development engineer and earned successively higher-level positions in the organization. Gern studied computer science at the University of Stuttgart, focusing on software engineering, distributed artificial intelligence, and robotics, and earned his Ph.D. in 2005.