The achievement in 1995 of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) in dilute gases of alkali- metal atoms was one of the most important experimental results in recent times. Fifteen years later, the study of quantum fluids is a vibrant field exploring topics such as the effects of dimensionality and disorder on quantum fluids and the modeling of condensed-matter systems with BECs in optical lattices. This thesis describes the achievement of BEC in the alkaline-earth metal atom strontium (Sr). This new addition to the family of elements that have been Bose-condense opens new possibilities, such as the use of an optical Feshbach resonance to tune atom-atom interactions with relatively low atomic losses. Equally exciting theoretical proposals have been made for using quantum fluids made of alkaline-earth metal atoms, like creating exotic quantum magnetism states and demonstrating quantum computation in optical lattices. Previous efforts at achieving BEC with Sr focused on using the most abundant isotopes, ⁸⁸Sr and ⁸⁶Sr, without success. This thesis also describes our use of two-photon photoassociation spectroscopy (PAS) for accurate determination of the s-wave scattering length a (a measure of the interaction strength) for all the Sr isotopes and isotope mixtures. This result was essential for determining that bosonic ⁸⁴Sr possesses the ideal collisional properties for efficient evaporative cooling to quantum degeneracy. ⁸⁴Sr would not otherwise be the isotope of choice because its natural abundance is very low (0.6%). The PAS results also showed that ⁸⁸Sr and ⁸⁶Sr have unfavorable collision properties, which explains the difficulties encountered when attempting to form quantum degenerate ⁸⁸Sr and ⁸⁶Sr.