Category:Celebrities with PhDs
The Doctor of Philosophy is a research degree awarded on the strength of an original dissertation, and among public figures it is rare enough that it usually gets mentioned in the first line of a profile. This category collects people on this wiki who hold one. What the roster actually contains is less a list of academics than a list of people who took a doctorate and then left the university with it: economists who ended up running central banks and finance ministries, physicists and geochemists who ended up in Congress and at NASA, and a bench of research scientists who ended up running the universities they trained in.
Doctorates in public office
The clearest pattern in this membership is the doctorate as a credential for economic policy. Janet Yellen completed her doctorate under James Tobin and was also advised by Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel laureates in economics, before chairing the Federal Reserve and serving as Secretary of the Treasury. Mark Carney took a DPhil in economics at Oxford, then led two central banks and became Prime Minister of Canada. Kenneth Rogoff, Jason Furman, Lars Peter Hansen, Richard Thaler and Raj Chetty carry the same credential into policy debate rather than office.
The pattern extends past economics. Bill Foster worked as a high-energy physicist at Fermilab, where he contributed to particle accelerator design, and remains one of very few members of Congress with a doctorate in a physical science. Condoleezza Rice took her doctorate in political science at the University of Denver before becoming Secretary of State. Newt Gingrich earned a doctorate in modern European history at Tulane before entering the House. Kyrsten Sinema holds a doctorate alongside a law degree and a master's in social work. Tony Evers took his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees all at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before becoming that state's governor. Neil Gorsuch went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar for doctoral research in legal philosophy before joining the Supreme Court of the United States.
The university presidencies
A second and quieter cluster consists of research scientists who moved into academic administration. Sally Kornbluth earned her doctorate at Rockefeller University as a cell biologist and became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sian Leah Beilock, a cognitive scientist, became president of Dartmouth College. Daniel Diermeier, trained in the German social science tradition before doctoral work in the United States, became chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Julio Frenk took a joint doctorate in medical care organization and sociology in 1983 and has led both a school of public health and a university. Laurie Leshin took her doctorate in geochemistry at Caltech and went on to direct NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ben Sasse belongs to the same group from the opposite direction: he had already been president of Midland University before his election to the Senate, and resigned the seat in January 2023 to take another university presidency.
The research bench
The largest single occupational block is scientists who stayed in research, and it is unusually decorated. Edward Witten, Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, Peter Higgs, David Thouless, Steven Chu, Frederick Reines and Joseph Taylor Jr. represent theoretical and experimental physics. Roger Kornberg, Craig Mello, David Julius, Ardem Patapoutian, Avram Hershko, Rolf Zinkernagel, Michael Levitt and Francis Collins represent the life sciences. James Heckman, Michael Spence, Robert Mundell, Robert Aumann and David Card represent economics. Michio Kaku and Brené Brown, who took doctorates in theoretical physics and in social work respectively, are the two members whose public profiles rest on writing and broadcasting rather than on the research itself.
See also
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