Portman was a straight-A student."I'd rather be smart than be a movie star,"she told an interviewer. Although she says her family was not religious, she attended a Jewish elementary school, the Solomon Schechter Day School of Glen Cove, New York. She graduated from a public high school, Syosset High School.Portman reportedly skipped the premiere of Star Wars: Episode I so she could study for her high school final exams.
In June 2003, Portman graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in psychology,and pursued graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the spring of 2004. At Harvard, Portman was Alan Dershowitz's research assistant (he thanks her in The Case for Israel). She was also a research assistant in a psychology lab, and in March 2006, appeared as a guest lecturer at a Columbia University course in terrorism and counterterrorism, where she spoke about her film V for Vendetta.In addition to being bilingual in Hebrew and English, Portman has studied French, Japanese, German and Arabic.
As a student, Portman co-authored two research papers which were published in professional scientific journals. Her 1998 high school paper on the "Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen" was entered in the Intel Science Talent Search. In 2002, she contributed to a study on memory called "Frontal Lobe Activation During Object Permanence" during her psychology studies at Harvard.