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.
[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.
[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.