Marcus Birkenkrahe (born 29 December 1963 as Marcus Speh in Bad Kreuznach, Germany) is a physicist and information architect who also works as an executive coach.^[2]

After obtaining his Abitur in 1983, Birkenkrahe studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the University of Hamburg. In 1994, he worked as a research assistant at DESY in Zeuthen near Berlin and earned his doctorate with a dissertation on multigrid computations for lattice gauge theories using object-oriented, literate programming.^[3]

As co-founder and chairman of the Globewide Network Academy (GNA), he received the awards for "Best Campus-Wide Information System"^[4] and "Best Educational Site"^[1] at the First World-Wide Web conference (WWW1) in Geneva, Switzerland in 1994. Between 1995 and 2001 he worked as a corporate IT executive for Accenture and Royal Dutch Shell.^[5]

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), London (1998–2008) and has been a registered expert and reviewer for knowledge management for the European Union since 1999. In 2002, he served as a visiting professor for knowledge management at the University of Auckland Business School where he won the "Best Paper 2002" award of the University of Auckland Business Review.^[6][7]

From 2007 to 2023, Birkenkrahe was a professor of management information systems at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, a German University of Applied Sciences^[8] and Head of E-Learning (since 2008).

In 2021 he joined the Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas as visiting professor of Data Science on a leave of absence from the Berlin School of Economics and Law. In 2022 he accepted a permanent position as Professor of Computer and Data Science at Lyon College.^[9]

He serves as member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Big Data Management^[10] and of the International Journal of Data Science.^[11]