On June 5, 2003, Portman graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in psychology.
"I don't care if [college] ruins my career," she told the New York Times, "I'd rather be smart than a movie star." At Harvard, Portman was Alan Dershowitz's research assistant in a psychology lab. While attending Harvard, she was a resident of Lowell House[18] and wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson in response to an anti-Israeli essay.
Portman took graduate courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the spring of 2004.[12] In March 2006, she appeared as a guest lecturer at a Columbia University course in terrorism and counterterrorism, where she spoke about her film V for Vendetta.[20]
Portman has professed an interest in foreign languages since childhood and has studied French,[21] Japanese,[21] German,[22] and Arabic.[23]
As a student,
Portman co-authored two research papers that were published in professional scientific journals. Her 1998 high school paper, "A Simple Method To Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar," was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search.[24] In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal Lobe Activation During Object Permanence" during her psychology studies at Harvard.
Natalie Portman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia