Queen’s Guitarist Finished His PhD at 60: 12 Celebrities With Degrees You’d Never Guess

Brian May was working on a PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London when Queen formed in 1970. As the band took off, he put the doctorate on hold.

In August 2007, at 60, he handed in the finished thesis, Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud; the college called it highly unusual for a PhD registration to lapse for more than 30 years. “I’m feeling rather joyful. I cannot tell you how much of a weight off the mind it is,” he said. The photo shows him at NASA’s New Horizons flyby event in December 2018.

Lisa Kudrow graduated from Vassar College with a degree in biology and worked on research with her father before she turned to comedy. In February 1994, the journal Cephalalgia published a study on left-handedness, and one of its co-authors is listed as Kudrow LV, as in Lisa Valerie Kudrow.

Seven months later, Friends premiered, and she played Phoebe for ten seasons. This year she starred in a new season of The Comeback.

Before he was Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson studied electrical and electronic engineering at Newcastle University and graduated in 1975. He went on to The Queen’s College, Oxford, for a master’s in electrical engineering, and his thesis, published in 1978, dealt with self-tuning control systems.

He briefly started a doctorate there before comedy took over. The college later made him an Honorary Fellow, and its alumni newsletter lists him under “1975, Engineering.”

Danica McKellar played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years from 1988 to 1993, then studied mathematics at UCLA. As an undergraduate she co-wrote a paper with professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn, published in the Journal of Physics A in 1998.

The result is known as the Chayes—McKellar—Winn theorem. She graduated summa cum laude in math the same year, and she has since written several math books for girls, starting with Math Doesn’t Suck.

Ken Jeong earned his medical degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995 and worked as a doctor in Los Angeles for about seven years, doing stand-up comedy at night.

He kept going to comedy clubs until acting took over, and The Hangover (2009) made him famous as Mr. Chow. He went on to star in the sitcom Community.

Art Garfunkel enrolled at Columbia as an architecture student in 1960 and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1965, majoring in art history. In 1967 he finished a master’s in mathematics education at Teachers College, Columbia.

In September 1971, a year after Bridge Over Troubled Water came out, he started teaching at a prep school in Litchfield, Connecticut, where his subjects included geometry and algebra.

Tom Scholz earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in mechanical engineering at MIT and went to work as a product design engineer at a camera company, where he had 11 patents by 1976. For five years after work, he built songs in a makeshift basement studio in his apartment in Watertown, Massachusetts, playing all the instruments himself.

Those recordings became the band Boston’s 1976 debut album, the one with More Than a Feeling, and it went multiplatinum.

Mira Sorvino graduated from Harvard in 1989, magna cum laude, with a degree in East Asian studies, and spent a year in Beijing before she focused on acting. Harvard lists her among its notable graduates.

Seven years later she won the Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite. In September 2025 she made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago, and she is reuniting with Lisa Kudrow, No. 2 on this list, for a Romy and Michele sequel.

Brooke Shields was one of the most famous young actresses in America when she enrolled at Princeton in 1983. She graduated in 1987 with a degree in French literature, and her senior thesis was about the films of the French director Louis Malle.

The photo shows her in 1986, during her Princeton years. In 2024 she was elected president of Actors’ Equity, the union of stage actors.

Matthew McConaughey earned his film degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. In 2015 he started co-teaching a production class there called Script to Screen, and he developed its curriculum.

In fall 2019 he joined the Radio-Television-Film faculty as a professor of practice. The class follows a film from the script to the screen, and in past semesters the filmmakers behind the movies the students studied came to class.

Dexter Holland earned a bachelor’s in biological sciences at USC in 1988 and a master’s in molecular biology in 1990, then started a PhD. The Offspring’s success put it on hold for almost 20 years.

In 2017, at 51, he went back and finished his PhD in molecular biology. Along the way he flew his own plane solo around the world, and USC invited him back to give the May 2026 commencement address to about 2,000 graduates of its College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

After Weezer’s first album came out in 1994, Rivers Cuomo enrolled at Harvard in 1995. Over the next decade he left and came back several times, between albums and tours.

In June 2006, at 35, he graduated cum laude with a degree in English, and he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the U.S.