Wolfgang Ketterle (born October 21, 1957, in Heidelberg, Germany) is a German physicist and a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one of the three 2001 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman. His research activities focus on laser cooling and trapping of ultracold atoms. He was one of the main discoverers of Bose-Einstein condensation in gases.