A graduate of Northwestern University's medical school, in the early 1980's Dr. Birkel pursued his computer science graduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on "modeling of medical systems and decision-making in clinical analysis." In 1989 he joined the MITRE Corporation, where he became the lead developer and integrator of the Terrain Evaluation Module (TEM), a component of the Army Tactical Command and Control System.

Paul's work on TEM lead to his involvement with the distributed interactive simulation (DIS) and networked simulation. He was subsequently assigned as support staff to the then newly formed DMSO, where he contributed to the development of the DMSO master plan, as well as the review of many on-going and proposed DMSO projects. In mid-90's he became the chair of the Terrain Group of the DIS Workshop, which through Paul's involvement later became the Simulated Natural Environment forum of the Simulation Interoperability Workshop.

Between 1994 and 1999 he served as the technical advisor to the program manager for Synthetic Environments, a component of DARPA's Synthetic Theater Of War program (STOW). During his work on STOW, he was responsible for the technical oversight in design, development, and evolution of dynamic terrain technologies, real time weather integration into simulation, and integration with Synthetic Forces. In 1998, Paul developed the Conceptual Reference Model of the Synthetic Natural Environment as one of his initial contributions to the DARPA ASTT program, where he continued as technical advisor until 1999.

Since mid 1990's he has also been involved with, and contributed to, such programs as CCTT, JSAF, JSIMS, WARSIM, OneSAF Testbed, and OneSAF Objective System. In addition, his advice and guidance has been highly sought on a variety of technology initiatives and projects by the US Army Engineering Research and Development Center Topographic Engineering Center and US Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command.

As one of the original members of the SEDRIS core team, his work on SEDRIS began in 1994. He has been the driving force behind many SEDRIS technologies and innovations. His pioneering work on the use of classification and attribution encodings to represent the semantics of environmental objects has been a fundamental part of SEDRIS since the beginning. His work ultimately lead to the development and implementation of the EDCS as a stand-alone and independent technology. Today, the use of the EDCS has grown to many non-SEDRIS-based applications and data models. Paul's interest in providing a coherent method for the representation of location data lead to the development of SRM, as the second stand-alone and independent component of SEDRIS technologies. His determination to educate and promote the proper use of the terms, technology, and techniques has been extremely influential in the adoption and use of the SRM within the community. Paul has been highly instrumental in highlighting the importance of environmental technologies, and continues to advance the field. We are pleased to present the 2002 SEDRIS Outstanding Contributions and Achievements Award to Paul Birkel.