Gerald Keil studied Linguistics at California State University at San Francisco before moving to England in 1967, where he continued his research in Computer Linguistics at the University of Leeds. In the 1970s he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, then Post-doctoral Research Assistant at the University of Salford, and from 1975 to 1980 lecturer at the Centre for Computational Linguistics, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. In 1981 he assumed directorship of a research and development project at the University of the Saarland, Germany, in the area of computer translation.

He has been active as an IT professional since 1986, initially self-employed and from 1992 until his retirement in 2007 as head of the computer department of a company producing cast steel components for industrial use. He has been a Bahá’í since 1980.