Time to toss every physics nerd stereotype you ever had:
Brian May, the guitarist and founding member of the legendary rock band Queen, earned his PhD in astronomy last year from Imperial College London. His PhD thesis A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud has just been co-published by Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd.
Since this is a political science blog, this opens the question of who is the biggest celebrity with a Ph.D. in political science. My vote is for Robert Vaughn. He was one of the Magnificent Seven, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and he has a
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Raymond (Bud) Duvall is Robert Duvall’s brother. Does that count?
My vote is for Henry “The Kiss” Kissinger.
Lee, you need to check your sourcing on that myth. It doesn’t count because they are not brothers.
Mea culpa, apparently. Okay, I’ll try again: Bud Duvall is NOT Robert Duvall’s brother, but they have the same last name. Does THAT count?
Isn’t astronomy relating to zodiac signs and whether you’ll fall in love this week or not and that kind of stuff? Fail to see how that’s physics nerdy. Or hold any academic weight and relevance whatsoever.
Anyway, let’s not forget Woodrow Wilson.
My vote goes for Miuccia Prada, who got her Ph.D. in poli sci from the University of Milan.
Brian May, lead guitarist for Queen, has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, completed 30 years after he started his doctoral program.
Greg Graffin, lead singer and songwriter of Bad religion has a PhD in Zoology from Cornell. his dissertation is entitled “Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist Worldview: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology.”
not quite as famous in the Punk Rock PhD set is Milo Aukerman of the Descendants has a PhD in Biochemistry from the university of Wisconsin-Madison, dissertation topic “Analysis of Opaque-2 Function in Maize”
IMDB says his degree is in communications.
There must be something rebellious about PhD’s that attracts punk rockers: Bryan “Dexter” Holland, singer for The Offspring, was a PhD candidate in microbiology at USC but never ultimately finished it.
Robert Vaughn’s Ph.D. is only in Communications, but he did his undergrad at the University of Minnesota, where Professor Duvall is the chair of the Political Science Department.
In the category of “famous” Ph.D . candidates, I nominate Jessica Trisko (Miss Earth 2007, McGill) and Brooke Ellison (subject of the TV movie, The Brooke Ellison Story on A&E, Stony Brook).
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