Smart Stars | Geena Davis

Geena Davis is is an American actor, activist, model, and producer. She completed her bachelor's degree in drama from Boston College in 1979 and received honorary doctorate degrees in fine arts from Bosten College in 1999 and Bates College in 2009 for her work with the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media.

In addition to a successful modeling, acting, and production career, Davis is an advocate and activist for a multitude of subject matters and causes including women in sports, gender bias in media, STEM, and other humanitarian and envioronmental social and environmental challenges. Davis also trained and competed for a spot in the 2000 Sydney Olympics in the sport of archery.

Davis has been nominated for and received dozens of awards including an Oscar for Best Supporting Acress in The Accidental Tourist and a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama in "Commander in Chief". The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose her for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, an honorary Academy Award, for her work to undestand and address gender bias in media.

Davis was named the Future-ish 2021 Queen of the Smart Set.

Smart Stars | Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is an actor, producer, and director with American and Israeli citizenship. Portman was born in Jerusalem and is the only child of Avner Hershlag, a gynecologist, and Shelley Stevens who serves as Portman's manager. Portman had maternal great grand parents who died at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and a paternal Romanian great grandmother who was a British Intelligence spy in WWII.

The family moved to the US for her father's medical education when Portman was three years old. Portman graduated from High School in Syosset, Long Island in 1999 and then studied ballet and modern dance at the American Theater Dance Workshop in New York. She later graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a BA in Psychology. She has studied several foreign languages, including Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, and Japanese. Portman co-authored two research papers that were published in scientific journals, first while she was in high school and the second while she was at Harvard. she was in college. "A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar" was published in 1998 as part of the Intel Science Talent Search, co-authored by Ian Hurley and Jonathan Woodward. During her studies at Harvard as a research assistant to Alan Dershowitz, a paper on a memory research project she contributed to was published in 2002, titled "Frontal lobe activation during object permanence: data from near-infrared spectroscopy". Portman has taken graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was a guest lecture at Columbia in 2006 and was a commencement speaker at Harvard in 2015.

Portman has appeared in many main stream and independent films, as well as television, theater, and commercials. She has been nominated for and has won many prestigious acting awards including Academy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and SAG Awards - among many others. Portman made her directorial debut with Eve which won the 2008 shorts competition at the 65th Venice International Film Festival.

Portman has aligned herself with many causes, including animal rights, coal divestment, education, the environment, poverty alleviation, LGBT rights, micro-lending, women's rights, and both American and Israeli politics.

Portman has an Erdős–Bacon number of 7.

Portman was named the Future-ish 2018 Queen of the Smart Set.

Smart Stars | Christy Turlington Burns

Christy Turnlington Burns is an American fashion model, actor, director, entrepreneur, author, journalist, correspondent, and humanitarian.

Turlington began her modeling career in the late 1980s and gained a high profile when she began representing Calvin Klein in 1987. In 1990 she was one of five models on the cover of British Vogue magazine who became cross-industry superstars and helped define the 1990s as the supermodel era. In addition to her ongoing modeling career, she has appeared in many documentaries and has been a business partner in several apparel, health, and beauty ventures.

Turlington has been involved with multiple humanitarian projects. She was an anti-smoking activist early in her career, became involved CARE in 2005, is an ambassador for Project Red, and in April of 2010 founded her own nonprofit organization focused on international maternal health, Every Mother Counts.

Turlington graduated in 1999 from NYU with a BA focused on comparative religion and Eastern philosophy and as of 2013 is pursuing a MPH degree at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is an adviser to the Harvard School of Public Health Board of Dean’s Advisers and is a member of the Harvard Medical School Global Health Council.

Culture Icon | Stephen Farrelly (aka "Sheamus")

Stephen Farrelly is known by several other names...Sheamus, Sheamus O'Shaunessy (S0S), the Celtic Warrior, the Irish Curse, and the Great White. That comes with the territory though when you are a professional wrestler with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Farrelly has held many wrestling championships in Ireland and the US, including World Heavyweight Champion twice, and is huge fan favorite whenever he steps into the ring wherever he may be in the world.

What sets Farrelly apart from other sports entertainers is that he has an information technology degree and speaks fluent Gaelic. He also sang in choir until he was thirteen and was a star athlete in Irish football and rugby during his school and college years.

In addition to keeping up his championship wrestling, Farrelly has also recently taken on several causes. First, he joined other WWE stars and the Creative Coalition in the be a STAR project, an anti-bullying initiative that promotes tolerance and respect through education and awareness. Having been bullied as a child himself and later standing up against bullies for friends, the project is of personal importance to him. Farrelly is also a major advocate for education and particularly for young people to attend college. Finally, he is working hard to break stereotypes of Irish people and culture. For his stage persona he intentionally chose to stay away from kitchy Irish elements. Instead, he tapped into his background in Irish history, culture, and tradition to create a role model that would honor Celtic warriors and his own ancestry.

Below is a short video featuring the Muppets on bullying...



And an interview with Farrelli on The Late Late Show in which he talks about breaking Irish stereotypes...



The full interview (with some Gaelic and a cameo of Farrelly's choir boy days) can be found here.

Smart Stars | Danica McKellar

Danica McKellar is an American actress, author and math education ambassador. Many know her from her role as Winnie Cooper in the TV show The Wonder Years and subsequent acting career while others know her best as a New York Times bestselling author of her books promoting math to girls and young women which include Math Doesn't Suck, Kiss My Math, Hot X: Algebra Exposed, and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape. McKellar's math cred comes from her 1998 degree in mathematics from UCLA, where she graduated summa cum laude. While at university, McKellar co-authored a paper with fellow student, Brandy Winn, and their Professor Lincoln Chayes on the 'Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem'. McKellar's Erdős number is four and her Bacon number is two giving her an incredibly low Erdős-Bacon number of six.

From The Wonder Years to a becoming a wonder-Mom and role model, we give her an A+ for all her hard work promoting math to girls and young women. You go girl!

McKellar was named our Queen of the Smart Set for 2016.

>> Follow Danica McKellar on Future-ish.

Smart Stars | Loni Love

Detroit-born Comedian and actress Loni Love may know the formula to get a good laugh but she also knows the formula for resistance, inductance, and capacitance. What are those you ask? Well, electrical engineering formulas of course.

Before her success as a comedian and actress, Love received a scholarship to Prairie View A&M University in Texas where she studied music and yes, electrical engineering. After graduating, Love worked at Xerox for eight years while moonlighting as a regular at the Laugh Factory. When layoffs at Xerox were pending, she volunteered to leave and pursue her comedy career in order to save a job for someone else. Since then she's appeared in many plays, films, and TV shows. In addition to comedy and acting, she has served as a correspondent on CNN, covered the inauguration of President Obama, and been recognized with multiple awards and honors including our very own Queen of the Smart Set for 2013.

She's got science, she's got design (we include the performing arts in the 'design' realm here at future-ish), and she's got culture...a LOT of culture. We're just psyched our Goddess of Guffaw can bring a little science and intelligent insight to Chelsea Lately on occasion...the show really needs it. Just kidding Chelsea...we love you :-)

Smart Stars | Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher is an American model, actor, and producer. Kutcher was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and developed an interest in acting in high school. He started in the biochemical engineering program at the University of Iowa before dropping after winning a modeling competition in Iowa. Kutcher modeled for a short time in New York, Milan, and Paris and then moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in television and film and starred in series like That '70s Show and in movies such as Pearl Harbor. In addition to a very successful acting career, Kutcher has been active in investing in several social media and technology companies including Skype, Foursquare, Airbnb, Path and Fab.com. Kutcher has also been active in multiple nonprofits and social/environmental causes.

**Update**
After the 2013 Teen Choice Awards Ashton Kutcher received a lot of attention and praise for his acceptance speech in which shared some observations from his life before acting and from his recent role in the movie Jobs about Apple founder, Steve Jobs.

First, Kutcher shared that "opportunity looks a lot like hard work" and briefly chronicled the many jobs he held prior to modeling and acting including working for his dad, washing dishes at a restaurant, working at a grocery store deli, and even sweeping up Cheerios dust in a factory.

Kutcher's next observation garnered even more attention, he enthusiastically stated that "the sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart...and being thoughtful, and being generous. Everything else is crap, I promise you." And finally Kutcher shared what he learned form his Steve Jobs role...that every person can build their own life, rather than living someone else's. Kutcher's closing words were "build a life, don't live one, build one. Find your opportunities and always be sexy."

Here at Future-ish, we're all about using the power of pop culture to create positive change. Ashton Kutcher cheering that "the sexiest thing in the entire world is being really smart" at the Teen Choice Awards...can't do much better than that.

Watch Kutcher's speech below:

Smart Stars | Eva Longoria

Eva Longoria is an American actress, activist, and philanthropist best known for her roles on Desperate Housewives and Young and the Restless. Born in Corpus Christi, TX to Mexican-American parents Enrique Longoria, Jr. and Ella Eva Mireles, she can trace her Spanish ancestry in the New World back to 1603.

In college, Longoria studied kinesiology and received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1998, the same year she won the title of Miss Corpus Christi. Soon after university, she won an Infinity Model Search contest in LA where and was later signed by a theatrical agent. She joined the cast of Young and the Restless in 2001 as Isabella Braña, a role she won an ALMA Award for in 2002. She has since gone on to perform in many other tv shows and movies and has received multiple other acting nominations and awards.

Longoria founded Eva's Heroes in 2006, a charity which helps developmentally disabled children and serves as a spokesperson for many other nonprofit organizations. 2009 was a big year for Longoria. She enrolled in a Master's program in Chicano Studies and Political Science at Cal State University, Northridge, was appointed to a bi-partisan commission issued with the task of determining the feasibility of the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino, and was named Philanthropist of the year by the Hollywood Reporter for her commitment to Latino causes and giving back to the community. She also began serving as an executive producer of Shine Global Inc.'s film The Harvest/La Cosecha in 2009 (released in 2011), a documentary that focuses on three teenage Mexican migrant workers in order to raise awareness about the hundreds of thousands of child migrant farm workers in the U.S. In 2010, Longoria created the Eva Longoria Foundation to help Latinas build better futures for themselves and their families through education and entrepreneurship.

Longoria has become quite active in politics in recent years. In 2011 she proclaimed Arizona's SB 1070 immigration law unconstitutional and fought against Texas Governor Rick Perry’s budget cuts for services to the mentally disabled (including her sister). In 2012, she was one of seven Californians named as co-chairs of Barack Obama's re-election campaign and she later spoke Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

Smart Stars | Kellan Lutz

We're not sure if Kellan Lutz is better known for his character, Emmett Cullen, in the Twilight film series or his 2010 Calvin Klein underwear campaign. What we are sure of, however, is that his first career choice may come as quite a surprise to many of his fans. After growing up in North Dakota, Arizona and other parts of the Midwest, Lutz headed west to study chemical engineering at Chapman University in California. Modeling and acting ultimately pulled him away from college but in interviews Lutz admits that he still contemplates new inventions or how he might re-engineer every day items. Lutz is also big on charities ranging from PETA to the St. Bernard Project in New Orleans. Another surprise to many is that Lutz actually started his charity work early in his career as well with his first television appearance in 2004 being on the PAX TV reality show Model Citizens in which Models travelled to different parts of the United States and worked on community projects.

Smart Stars | Mayim Bialik

Mayim Bialik is an American actress best known for her lead role as Blossom Russo in the 1990s sitcom Blossom and more recently for her role in CBS's The Big Bang Theory as Amy Farrah Fowler. Here at Future-ish, we are big, Big, BIG fans of Bialik because she is a perfect example of someone who is passionate about science, design, and culture.

Bialik was born in San Diego, CA to Barbara and John Bialik, a nursery school director and high school drama teacher respectively. Bialik was raised in Reform Judaism. Her given name means 'water' in Hebrew. Bialik's grandparents emigrated to the USA in the 1930s from Poland and what was at the time, Czechoslovakia/Hungary.

After Blossom, Bialik was accepted to Harvard, Yale, and UCLA. She chose UCLA to stay close to her parents and in 2000 earned undergraduate degrees in in neuroscience, Hebrew, and Jewish studies. She completed her PhD in neuroscience in 2008. Bialik is a vegan and a celebrity spokesperson for the Holistic Moms Network. She continues to study Judaism and is well known for keeping fans up to date on preparations for Jewish events and holidays via social media. Oh...and she's a huge fan of the Maccabeats.

Given Mayim's fabulous showing at the 2011 Emmy's, she's now officially on our Glamour Geek list too. Check her out on the E! 360 Glam Cam below (click image to get the full E! Glam Cam experience)...

In 2012, Future-ish named Bialik as our second Queen of the Smart Set.

Smart Stars - Rowan Atkinson

He makes us laugh, he makes us cry...he makes us laugh until we cry. Rowan Atkinson is a British comedian, writer, and actor. Along with satire, Atkinson is a lettered scientist. Atkinson first studied electrical engineering at Newcastle University and then continued for his Masters in Science at Oxford's Queen's College. It was at Oxford that Atkinson acted in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, the Oxford Revue, and the Experimental Theatre Club.

Smart Stars - Dolph Lundgren

Dolph Lundgren is a Swedish marshal artist, actor, and director. Long before his action hero days, Lungdren studied at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology and later earned his Master's in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney in 1982. In 1983, Lundgren became a Fulbright Scholar at MIT but he quit prior to graduation to pursue acting. Lundgren is fluent in Swedish, English, and Spanish, and can communicate in German, French, Japanese, and Italian as well.

Sceleb and Culture Icon - Phillip Chbeeb

Not only can Phillip Chbeeb pop some moves on You Think You Can Dance he can calculate integrals too. That's right, Chbeeb may be one of season 5's top dancers, but he's also an engineering physics major at Loyala University. Chbeeb may just bring a whole new meaning to the field of 'spintronics'.

Smart Stars - Alicia Keys

With 11 Grammy Awards and counting, 17 Billboard Music Awards, 5 American Music Awards, and over thirty million albums sold around the world, Alicia Keys has become one of most successful musicians of our time. But this singer-songwriter, pianist, cellist and actress isn't just the queen of beauty and ballads, she's got brains too. She began playing classical piano at age 7 and later graduated valedictorian from the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan after only three years at age 16. She was accepted to Columbia University but was swept way after only four weeks when her music career took center stage. She also believes strongly in creating positive change and giving back. Keys is the co-founder and Global Ambassador of Keep a Child Alive, a non-profit organization that provides medicine to families with HIV/AIDS in Africa, has supported several environmental nonprofits, and has performed in charity concerts including Live 8, ReAct Now, Live Earth, and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize concert.

Smart Stars - Cindy Crawford

She may have one of the most famous faces in the world, but few people know that model, actress, and entrepreneur Cindy Crawford actually started out as a scientist. That's right, not only was she valedictorian of her high school class, she won an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering at Northwestern University. She only lasted one quarter before her modeling career took off. Her connection to science continued through her support of pediatric cancer research in honor of her brother who died from leukemia in childhood. In particular, she is a long time supporter of the UW Pediatric Oncology Program. She is an honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and a celebrity board member of the Ronald McDonald House Charities' Friends of RMHC program.

Ms. Crawford has also been an eco-activist for many years having served on the board of the Earth Communications Office and most recently as a spokesperson for the Pur Thirsty for Change initiative.