Robert C Merton As an undergraduate at Columbia, I went to the engineering school. I had a great deal of training in engineering and mathematics as well as subdiversified training. And then I went to the California Institute of Technology to do my Ph.D. in applied math. – Robert C Merton
Rick Bright Well, I have been trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses. I have a Ph.D. in virology. – Rick Bright
Ren Ng Photography has always been a passion of mine, but I began to study light field photography when I was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University. – Ren Ng
Rashid Johnson I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city. – Rashid Johnson
Randall Munroe One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that’s just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%. – Randall Munroe
Ram Shriram In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don’t have that happening in India. – Ram Shriram
Peter Orszag For example, I was privileged to be working at the White House under the Clinton administration and had not finished my Ph.D., and I thought I was the cat’s meow. – Peter Orszag
Percy Julian I’m married to a dear little girl who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. – Percy Julian
Paul Berg By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD. – Paul Berg
Patricia Polacco My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, ‘Wow, you can really draw.’ Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History. – Patricia Polacco
Pardis Sabeti When I was working on my Ph.D., I developed a computer algorithm to look for rapid changes in populations’ DNA. Our DNA changes constantly over generations, but if certain changes spread through a population more quickly than others, they are probably the beneficial results of natural selection. This is the protection we give ourselves to survive. – Pardis Sabeti
