Gaëtan Kerschen completed his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Liège in Belgium in 2003. In 2003 and 2004, he was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at National Technical University of Athens and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2007, he has been a faculty member at the University of Liège, where he is a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. His publications are primarily in the areas of structural dynamics (with a focus on aerospace structures) and orbital mechanics.

He is the recipient of two European Research Council (ERC) grants, namely an ERC Starting Grant and an ERC Proof of Concept Grant, and of the 2017 Belgian Francqui Chair at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He also received the Doak Award from the Journal of Sound and Vibration in 2017. He was one of the principal investigators of the OUFTI-1 nanosatellite launched by the Soyuz rocket in 2016 for which he received the Walloon Medal for Merit (Chevalier du Mérite Wallon). He is the co-founder of NOLISYS, a startup company which provides solutions and software for nonlinear vibrating systems.