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