Wolfgang Ketterle was born in Heidelberg in 1957 in Heidelberg. Even as a young boy, he enjoyed experimenting with electricity kits and chemistry in the family basement. After graduating from highschool, he studied physics in Heidelberg and Munich between 1982 and 1986, then, upon completion of his doctorate, the focus of his research shifted to the field of cold atoms. In 1990, a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship took him to the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he taught and continued researching. In 1995, he and his team were able to achieve Bose-Einstein Condensation, a state of matter first predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in the 1920s. He made this breakthrough just three months after two US scientists achieved similar results, but soon afterwards, Ketterle also demonstrated interference between two colliding condensates, as well as the first realization of an "atom laser", the atomic analogue of an optical laser. He was rewardded for hsi work with a Nobel Prize.