This year the American Ornithologists' Union takes pleasure in bestowing its service award to a talented and hard-working individual who has made crucial contributions in two distinct professional arenas over the past decade. While providing the database and programming expertise that allows the Field Museum of Natural History to be the largest bird collection that is fully digitized and online, Peter Lowther has served the AOU as its Assistant to the Secretary (Scientific Program Coordinator) for eight years and seven meetings. That is a monumental undertaking each year, including receipt and acknowledgment of abstracts, organizing them into meaningful paper sessions, and coordinating with the Local Committee to design and produce each meeting's scientific program. Peter has successfully piloted conversion of this process from the old “hard copy” days into the smoothly running electronic submission process by which virtually all of this year's 750 abstracts were received (>300 on the deadline day). Also, over the past 10 years, wearing his ornithologist hat, Peter Lowther has authored or coauthored no fewer than 31 accounts for the Birds of North America (BNA) project, far more than any other contributor to this project. By the time the final volume of BNA is printed and mailed this winter, it will be no exaggeration to say that the timely completion of that historic project would have been impossible without the tireless effort and scholarship contributed to the project by Peter Lowther during every year since 1992. For his painstaking work that continues to advance the operation and scientific mission of the American Ornithologists' Union, the Executive Committee takes great pleasure in presenting the Marion Jenkinson AOU Service Award for 2002 to Peter E. Lowther.