10 Celebrities who are also secretly scientists

Queen's lead guitarist is not only responsible for the guitar riffs on songs like We Will Rock You. Brian May is also an astrophysicist with a PhD from Imperial College London. In the 1970s he started a PhD research into zodiacal dust, the small particles that float through the solar system. When Queen broke through internationally, he was forced to put his research aside. It was not until 2007, more than thirty years later, that May returned to university to complete his dissertation. His thesis on dust particles in the zodiacal dust cloud turned out to still be scientifically relevant. Since then, May has contributed as a guest researcher and collaborator to various data analyzes of NASA missions, including New Horizons and OSIRIS-REx. He still regularly contributes to peer-reviewed papers on cosmic dust.

In The Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik played neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler. What many viewers didn't know is that Bialik is also a real neuroscientist. She received her PhD from UCLA in 2007. Her dissertation focused specifically on the hypothalamus and obsessive-compulsive disorders in people with Prader-Willi syndrome. Bialik started her career as a child actress in the 1990s with the series Blossom. She then consciously opted for a scientific education and largely stopped acting. It wasn't until she completed her PhD that she returned to Hollywood. Her scientific background came in handy on set, because she was able to assess the content of her character's technical dialogues well.

Dolph Lundgren became world famous as Russian boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. His muscular appearance and subsequent action film career do not immediately suggest that he is highly educated. Lundgren, however, has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the University of Sydney. After graduating, he was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to MIT. However, an actual study in Boston never happened. In New York he met singer Grace Jones and became her bodyguard. Through her he quickly entered the film industry. In interviews, Lundgren later admitted that the entertainment world at the time was simply too tempting to return to technology.

Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood's biggest stars in the 1940s, praised at the time for her striking appearance. After her working days at MGM Studios, however, she started working on complex inventions at home. Together with composer George Antheil, she developed a system for frequency hopping, intended to make torpedoes undetectable to enemy ships. In 1942 they received a patent for this secret communications system. The US Navy immediately ignored it at the time. Only decades later was the underlying technology rediscovered. Although she did not directly invent Wi-Fi, the principles of her spread-spectrum technology provide an important foundation for modern systems such as Bluetooth and GPS.

Ken Jeong played eccentric gangster Leslie Chow in The Hangover and teacher Ben Chang in Community. Before becoming a full-time actor, however, he was a practicing internist. Jeong graduated from the University of North Carolina Medical School and did his residency in New Orleans. During the day he treated patients, while in the evening he performed stand-up comedy on stage. His breakthrough came with a supporting role as a gynecologist in the film Knocked Up. Director Judd Apatow specifically looked for someone with actual medical experience. Jeong's wife, also a doctor, then encouraged him to make the move to Hollywood.

Dexter Holland is the frontman of The Offspring. What is less known is that Holland is also a molecular biologist. He studied biology at the University of Southern California and received his bachelor's and master's degrees there before the band's worldwide breakthrough in 1994 with the album Smash. When the band became a success, Holland temporarily put his PhD research on hold. Almost twenty years later he returned to university to complete his scientific work. In 2017, he successfully obtained his PhD for research into microRNA sequences in the HIV genome, the results of which were published in various journals.

Natalie Portman was already an established movie star when she decided to go to college. After her role as Queen Amidala in Star Wars, she chose to study at Harvard University. She graduated in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in psychology and worked as a research assistant in a cognitive laboratory at the time. During her academic years, her education was consistently prioritized and she conducted research under her birth name Natalie Hershlag. In 2002, she contributed as co-author to a published scientific article on memory development in babies. She says her psychological background helped her enormously in understanding her later, complex characters.

Lisa Kudrow played the eccentric Phoebe Buffay on Friends for ten years. Before she took her first steps in the acting world, she was involved in medical research. Her father was a well-known headache specialist. After studying biology at Vassar College, Lisa started working in his practice. She participated in clinical studies for many years, looking, among other things, at the prevention of cluster headaches in left-handed people. Although she found the biological theories fascinating, she ultimately decided to go to Los Angeles for auditions. Not much later she permanently exchanged the laboratory for the sitcom set.

Gene Simmons is the fire-breathing bassist of the rock band KISS. Before he was on stage as a demon, he had a completely different job. Simmons obtained his teaching certificate in the United States and spent a Blue Monday teaching 8th grade at an elementary school in New York. He didn't last long in the classroom. He later stated that at the time he was mainly looking for a stage to be seen, and that forty schoolchildren were simply not enough. He wanted to stand in front of tens of thousands of people. In 1973 he founded KISS, after which the band sold more than 100 million records.

Volodymyr Zelensky was one of Ukraine's most popular comedians. He founded a successful production company and starred in the satirical series Servant of the People. In it, he played a history teacher who unexpectedly becomes president after a video about corruption goes viral. In 2019, the fiction became reality. Zelensky founded a political party, campaigned on social media and won the election with more than 73 percent of the vote. After the Russian invasion in 2022, his image changed permanently. He refused evacuation lifts from Western allies and became the face of the Ukrainian resistance.