Dr. Brian May is not the only super smart rocker out there.
So we all know how bright Dr. May is, he walked away from completing his Ph.D. to hit the road with Freddie and the boys which did work out for him. However after a four-decade reign at the top of the charts, May decided to return to his first love, astrophysics and completed his Ph.D in 2007. (Actually in 2015 he went to work with other astrophysicists to analyze data from the Pluto Horizons probe from NASA) I would love to be a fly on the wall if Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian May ever met up … I wouldn’t understand anything that they talked about … but it would be cool!)
However Brian May is not alone in his ability to crank out the tunes and rock academic greatness.
One of my personal favorite rocking Dr.’s is the front man for the legendary punk rock band Bad Religion. I actually met Greg a couple times in the nineties and he is both super smart and super funny. In 1979, Greg Graffin and some of his high school classmates formed the band Bad Religion in Southern California. Greg earned undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Geology from University of California, Irvine. He went on to earn a Master’s Degree from UCLA in Geology. Dr. Graffin then earned his PhD in zoology from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The title of Graffin’s dissertation is “Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology.” So yeah … not sure I could contribute much to a conversation about that. Professor Graffin has taught at both University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at Cornell University.
Check out Professor Graffin and his band below….
Other Ph.D.’s in the rock world…
Sterling Morrison – Velvet Underground
Karl Precoda – Dream Syndicate
Milo Aukerman – The Descendants
Dexter Holland – The Offspring (He’s pretty fly for a SMART Guy)