William S. Heckscher
From 1918 to 1921, the family lived in the Netherlands while Heckscher's father served as the Weimar Republic's ambassador to The Hague; there, Heckscher enrolled at the Nederlandsch Lyceum. Heckscher pursued his interests in history and Flemish art by spending his off hours studying at the Dutch Royal Library, the Mauritshuis and the Kröller-Müller Museum, but was dismissed from the Lyceum in 1920 for "lack of scholarly potential". After the family returned to Hamburg, Heckscher attended the city's Kunstgewerbeschule, now the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, but failed a class in ceramics.
Heather Lewandowski
Lewandowski grew up in Laurium, Michigan. She studied physics at Michigan Technological University and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1997. Whilst at Michigan Technological University, Lewandowski was a member of the Husky Pep Band. She joined the University of Colorado Boulder for her graduate studies, working with Eric Allin Cornell on Bose gases. During her PhD she observed Bose–Einstein condensate gases, where she could see atoms in different spin states. She described a simplified system to create Bose–Einstein condensate in Rb. Her system included a compressed Ioffe-Pritchard trap and large, powerful laser beams. The trap includes powerful permanent magnets and low power electromagnetic coils. She completed her PhD thesis "Coherences and correlations in an ultracold Bose gas" in 2002. She was a finalist for the American Physical Society Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in AMO Physics Award.