A doctorate is the highest degree you can get. While there are plenty of celebs with impressive degrees, there are some who are so smart, they have their PhD, MD, or JD.
Here are 27 celebs with doctorate degrees:
1.
Dr. Ken Jeong earned his medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and he completed his internal medicine residency in New Orleans, where he won the Big Easy Laff-Off. Soon after, he moved to LA to pursue comedy.
However, the decision to leave his medical career entirely didn’t come easily. On The Kelly Clarkson Show, he said, “[My first time doing comedy] was an open mic. I brought 20 friends, did well, performed the next week, brought no friends, and bombed. So, I distinctly remember that, and I stayed in medicine for 10 more years. It broke me. It broke me. I did not do very well.”
2.
Dr. Shaquille O’Neal earned his doctorate in education from Barry University in 2012, fulfilling a promise he made to his mom that he’d finish college after leaving Louisiana State for the NBA. He told the Miami Herald, “Everyone thinks this is honorary. But this is not honorary. I put in four and a half hard years staying up late at night, studying, reading, rewriting papers Dr. Kopp marked up. The work was very rigorous, but very enjoyable. And I’m not done. I think I’m going to try law school next. I’m thinking about it. We’ll see.”
3.
Disney Channel star Bridgit Mendler graduated with her JD from Harvard in 2024. She was also working towards a PhD, but she had to put in on pause. She tweeted, “The PhD is something I started working towards in 2020 and I pursued it jointly with my law degree but when I moved to California last summer and decided that for family reasons we would stay on the west coast, it had to go on pause. I apologize I really should have updated my LinkedIn page sooner. I’ll still fight for it, but how it gets completed is up to the administration and my principal investigator and what they think is appropriate.”
“Ultimately, any parent or person trying to juggle hard things has experienced that sometimes you have to make hard choices. My parents have a saying: ‘do everything it’s a blast.’ I enjoy pushing the boundary of the possible and saying yes to more things but also it is important to flex the muscle of prioritization and discernment. For myself I’ve found that learning when to say no or not right now can be more of a skill than saying yes,” she said.
4.
In the early ’70s, Dr. Brian May paused his astrophysics studies (his thesis was almost complete) to play guitar as a founding member of Queen, but 30 years later, he “put everything … on hold for a year” and completed his PhD from Imperial College, graduating in 2007.
He told TIME, “When I was about to finish my thesis, it was just the beginnings of Queen, and I had to make that choice. And my choice was made on the assumption that I wasn’t very good at physics, and I might be quite good at music. The thesis I had been working on was on zodiacal dust — the dust clouds in the solar system. When I began, it was a hot topic, but in that 30 years, it kind of lapsed. What happened very luckily for me, however, people began discovering dust clouds around other suns, in other solar systems. And suddenly, my subject became very in demand again. I started talking about astronomy again to people who said, ‘Why don’t you still do it?’ I put everything, and I mean everything, on hold for a year. And they put me in a little office in Imperial College, and I got down to it.”
5.
Dr. Peter Weller, who played the titular character in RoboCop and Starfleet Admiral Alexander Marcus in Star Trek Into Darkness, earned his PhD in Italian Renaissance art history from UCLA. He told Vulture, “One of the most beautiful days I ever had in my life was the other day, when I had to present 45 minutes of my dissertation in front of most of the European history department at UCLA, on the very day that Star Trek premiered. I had to take the day off from directing an episode of Longmire and fly in. Thank God for Paramount, ’cause they sent the car early to take us to UCLA first. My presentation is 50 pages of the dissertation — 45 slides. This is a very nerve-racking thing because they can fry you. The bureaucracy of academia makes the movie business look like Mary Poppins, man; the movie business, by comparison, is cream cheese.”
He continued, “So, I stand up; my beautiful wife is there. And I have a Star Trek white light experience before I start talking. All the pressure lifts. It’s like I’ve been lifted into a parallel world. I do this thing, and it’s fantastic, and the questions afterward are fantastic. I go out, on cloud nine, right to the Star Trek premiere. Now, I’ve walked a red carpet, I’ve been nominated for an Oscar, and I’ve been in that theater, you know? But I’ve never seen an opening like that. I’ve never seen one where all of Hollywood Boulevard is the red carpet. They’ve got podium after podium. We turn the corner and get out, and there’s like thousands — galleries of fans. Bandstands of fans, man. My wife says to me, ‘It’s Star Trek. It’s part of America. It’s been around for 45 years, Peter.’ And we had a ball.”
6.
Dr. Pedro-Juan Vázquez Bragan — aka PJ Sin Suela — graduated from Universidad Central del Caribe with his medical degree in 2015, but he quickly decided to pursue rap instead of medicine. However, he returned to medicine to help his fellow Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria.
He again returned to medicine during the pandemic, signing a one-year contract with a Puerto Rican hospital. He told Rolling Stone, “I started seeing news about how the hospitals were looking for more doctors and how everything was getting so overwhelmed…It was a year of a lot of growth for everybody. And I’m super glad that I could do my part.”
7.
Worried that he’d never be able to support himself as a writer, Dr. Michael Crichton earned his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969. However, during his final year, the film rights to his bestseller The Andromeda Strain were sold. He forwent a medical career entirely and went on to write novels like Jurassic Park and to write and direct movies like Westworld.
His medical knowledge led to the creation of one of his most notable works, ER. On his website, he said, “In 1974, I had just finished directing my first movie, Westworld, which was a science fiction story about a theme park with robots. For my next project, I wanted to do something completely different. I wrote a documentary-style movie about what happened during 24 hours in an emergency room. I thought the screenplay was terrific, but nobody would make the movie, finding it too technical, too chaotic, and too fast-moving. It sat on the shelf for the next 19 years, brought out every five or ten years, for updating, and for the studios and networks to look at, and reject yet again. Finally NBC made it as a TV pilot. And then it became a series.”
8.
Author and writer Dr. Sophie Ward, who’s known for The Nanny, earned a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. Her novel Love and Other Thought Experiments was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020.
9.
Actor and comedian Dr. Ellen Cleghorne, who was an iconic Saturday Night Live cast member in the ’90s, earned her PhD in performance studies from NYU in 2014. She told Slate, “Performance studies taught me to look at something and see one thing in everything. That gives you an opportunity, as there’s a never-ending amount of things you can write about, or write a sketch about. We’re all in resistance to something, and that’s what comedy is.”
10.
The Velvet Underground founding member and guitarist Dr. Sterling Morrison went back to school at University of Texas at Austin after the band split in 1971. He earned his PhD in medieval literature.
11.
The Offspring frontman Dr. Dexter Holland put his doctorate on hold when his band had a breakthrough with Smash in 1994. However, he returned in 2012 and earned his PhD in molecular biology from USC Dornsife in 2017. He told USC Dornsife Magazine, “Molecular biology and music may seem like polar opposites, but they overlap through math and pattern recognition.”
When writing The Offspring song “Come Out and Play,” he was inspired by his lab experience. Cooling Erlenmeyer flasks of hot liquid sparked the famous line, “Keep ’em separated.”
12.
Weird Science actor Dr. Ilan Mitchell-Smith earned his doctorate of Medieval English Literature from Texas A&M University. He went on to become a professor at California State University Long Beach. He reportedly told Kickin’ It Old School, “I have no regrets at all, and in general I am a happy man. I recently did a little bit of voice over work for Fox ADHD’s Axe Cop (which I followed and loved online before it was a show), but in general, I am out of the business, and I love my job as a professor.”
13.
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK alum Dr. Cheddar Gorgeous earned a doctorate of anthropology from the University of Manchester and researches topics such as fluid identities, sex work, public sex, and gay villages.
In a 2023 Instagram post, Cheddar shared, “Gonna stop teasing and tell you about my new job! That’s right I finally caved to parental pressure and decided to become a grown up academic! This week I embarked on a post-doctoral fellowship at [The University of Manchester]. The See Me; Hear Me project will be exploring disability and the use of drag as a form of radical advocacy and collaborative self expression…It’s a bit of an unexpected and radical life change for me but one that I always knew I would make at some point. A little less crazy tour life, a lot more quiet time reading! Queer people so often deny ourselves the pleasure of stability, routine and regularity. So often have boundaries been a source of oppression that we push them away whenever they appear on the horizon. I am looking forward to less time throwing myself around the world and more time to let my mind be mobile.”
14.
Dr. Robert A. Leonard, who sang in Sha Na Na and performed at Woodstock, left music when he was awarded a prestigious Fulbright fellowship, which funded his PhD in linguistics at Columbia. According to the New Yorker, since then, he’s become “one of the foremost language detectives in the country.” He worked on JonBenét Ramsey’s murder case, testifying that the ransom note he analyzed wasn’t written by the man who made a false confession.
He told Salon, “I like to say I’m one of the very few people in the world who have worked with the FBI and the Grateful Dead.”
15.
Sha Na Na founding member and singer Dr. Scott Powell lleft Columbia to pursue music with his band, but he later left the band to pursue acting. He got a master’s in theater from NYU, then he retired from acting after Caddyshack. While working on a screenplay, he visited an old friend who was a medical student, and shadowing him on the job inspired Scott to try another field. He told Westside Current, “So, it shook me in a couple of ways. One, that looked like a really interesting relationship with an audience, but it’s also a way to develop a specific skill set. I was 32, and my friend said, ‘You could be a doctor. Then you can be a doctor as long as you want. There’s no retirement age.'”
He got his medical decree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. When he was 45, he started his career as an orthopedic surgeon. He said, “Whenever I went to a new hospital or scrubbed in a new OR, I swept the floor afterwards just to let them know I’m not afraid. I swept the stage at Woodstock. I could certainly do it here.”
16.
Professor Denny Greene, the original Sha Na Na singer, also joined the band while he was a student at Columbia. They only played shows on weekends so that the members who were still students could attend class. After graduating, he balanced directing and writing theater and music with touring. He later earned his master’s from Harvard and his JD from Yale. Then, after working as an executive for Columbia Pictures for a few years, he became a law professor.
17.
Dr. Mayim Bialik took a break from acting after Blossom and earned her PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. When she returned to acting, she played neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. On Popcorn with Peter Travers, she said, “The true story is I was running out of health insurance and figured if I could even get a couple of acting jobs here and there, and if it’s enough to get you your Screen Actors Guild AFTRA health insurance, we would at least have insurance.”
18.
Dr. George Miller dabbled in short film at the end of medical school and continued working as a doctor to earn a living while writing and directing his first low-budget feature film, Mad Max. He, of course, went on to write and direct the successful, decades-spanning Mad Max franchise.
He told Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, “I always found this quote, that John Lennon line, ‘Life is what happens when you are making other plans,’ and it’s definitely true in my case. I always wanted to be a doctor, enjoyed being a doctor. But at the same time… suddenly became interested in cinema at a time when you couldn’t really have a career. There were no movies being made in Australia to speak of — at least by Australians.”
19.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power actor Dr. Lenny Henry (aka Sir Lenny Henry) earned his PhD in media arts from Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2018. His thesis was titled “Does the Coach Have to be Black? The Sports Film, Screenwriting and Diversity: A Practice-Based Enquiry.”
His decision to pursue higher education came after a long road of being discouraged at school but encouraged by his mother and his entertainment peers. When he first registered for the program, he told the Independent, “Me doing a PhD – that’s the most unlikely thing to be mooted by anybody anywhere in the world. It’s like the Krankies becoming rocket scientists.” He went on to serve as chancellor of Birmingham City University for eight years and helped establish the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity.
20.
The Descendents singer Dr. Milo Aukerman earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego. He balanced his music “hobby” with his career as a principal investigator at DuPont. He told ASBMB Today, “There’s a stereotype of a punk being this tough, tattoo-laden meathead. But in fact, many nerds ended up turning to punk, because it was a way of releasing some of that frustration that they had for being nerds…Punks are the champions of the nerds.”
However, in 2016, he retired from research to pursue music full-time. He told Spin, “Music’s always been my release from the drudgeries of my normal job. When my normal job was exciting, that’s when I was least interested in pursuing music. But there have been times when my job has been less and less creative, and then I’d search for something else to use as that outlet. I was working at DuPont, and they had put me out in Siberia doing some things I didn’t want to do. So at some point, I was like, ‘Well, I should just quit my job,’ and then they did it for me. The last day of my job, I had to turn in my badge and turn in my company computer. I did all that at the site, and then I drove to the airport to get Bill to record vocals for the record. For the foreseeable future, I want to try this whole music-as-a-career thing, which I’ve never really done before.”
21.
My Two Dads and Step by Step actor Staci Keanan – aka Professor Anastasia Sagorsky — earned her law degree from Southwestern Law School in 2013. She currently serves as the Deputy District Attorney at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at her alma mater.
22.
Dr. Michael Bishop, the former bassist and current singer in the heavy metal band GWAR, graduated with his PhD in music from the University of Virginia in 2012.
He told University Communications, “I had left GWAR and started my own band called Kepone. We put records out on Touch and Go Records from Chicago, and we rode around doing that for several years. Then I got married, and I was kind of like, ‘Well, I guess I gotta stop.’ When I did, I realized I had never gone to school. I got into GWAR when I was in high school and had never gone to college. I was driving for a living, and I was like, ‘This sucks, man.’ If there’s no promise of gigs to do and no rock ‘n’ roll future, then just working becomes a real drudgery. I could work a day job all day long if I knew I was working toward something else. I just kind of was like, ‘I gotta go back to school. I got to do something. I have to figure out what I’m good at.'”
23.
Before joining the family business as a fashion designer, Dr. Miuccia Prada earned her PhD in political science from the University of Milan. She told Vogue, “I always thought there were only two noble professions: politicians or doctors. Doing clothes [while coming from] a group of very important intellectuals — for me, it was like a nightmare. I was so ashamed, but anyway, I did it…. The love of beautiful objects prevailed. I work for a luxury company. It’s not perfect for a political position like mine — this was always the biggest contradiction in my life.”
24.
Dr. Don S. Davis earned a doctorate in theater from Southern Illinois University in 1982. He was an academic and professor until 1987, when he retired to pursue acting full-time, landing notable roles in Stargate SG-1 and Twin Peaks. He told The Scifi World, “I have a PhD in theater and spent many years teaching theater in various North American colleges and universities. Becoming a professional actor was a natural progression.”
25.
Bad Religion singer Dr. Greg Graffin earned his PhD in zoology from Cornell in 2003. He lectures on evolution at his alma mater, and he’s drawn to the topic for similar reasons as punk rock. He told the Cornell Daily Sun, “Charles Darwin waited 20 years to publish his discovery about the origin of species. He had come to the conclusion that species originate by natural selection, but he didn’t publish it for 20 years. That’s because it was so foreign to polite Victorian society that if he were to publish it early, he and his family could have easily been shunned by the very scientific community that he was aspiring to. So he kept it quiet, but ultimately, he published evolution by natural selection, On the Origin of Species [by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life] in 1859.”
“When he did, there was a firestorm, [and] there was still a backlash. In a sense, it was against all the polite social interactions of scientists at the time to suggest that humans and chimpanzees, for instance, could be closely related by a common descent. His countercultural revolt was overturning the currently held view that they call[ed] natural theology, which today we call creationism. But creationism was the norm when he published his theory, so there was a tremendous social backlash to the Darwinian story. That’s why it’s interesting to social scientists, as well as biologists, because, in a sense, he was partaking in this countercultural strain that’s been part of human existence ever since. Most theories that have been presented overturn the currently held view, and there’s something appealing about that if you’re a punk rocker,” he said.
26.
Dr. Peter Wingfield studied medicine at Oxford University and St. Bartholomew’s Medical College in London, but he dropped out a month before graduating to pursue an acting career. However, in 2011, the Highlander: The Series actor went back to medical school in Vermont. He now works as an anesthesiologist at LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
27.
And finally, Dr. Harold Gould earned a PhD in theater from Cornell. He was also a professor at the university from 1948 to 1953, and he taught drama, literature, and speech. However, in his late 30s, he left academia for acting, landing roles in everything from The Sting to The Golden Girls. Per the Guardian, he said, “All of my colleagues would say, ‘What are you doing? You’re crazy to leave teaching.’ I had to take the leap.”
