The lead in NBC's "Blossom" as a kid, Bialek went on to get her bachelor's degree in neuroscience, as well as Hebrew and Jewish studies from UCLA in 2000, though she had also been accepted to Harvard and Yale.

She stepped away from her studies in 2005 to go back to acting and made a huge splash as the über-smart Amy Farrah Fowler on "The Big Bang Theory," but finished her Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2007, specializing in obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescents with Prader-Willi syndrome.