He seems to have lineage as a political refugee of Iranian heritage.
Nima Arkani-Hamed is a professor of physics at Harvard University. His father is a physicist who openly spoke against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard after the Iranian revolution in 1979. In fear for their lives, his family fled through the Turkish border on horseback in 1981, tearing up their passports as they cross the border. Nima's family emigrated to Canada where Nima finished high school and attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. He received is Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1997 and took a research position at Stanford before moving back to Berkeley two years later for a faculty position. The return was short-lived as Harvard snatched him up in 2001.
Nima is considered the greatest theoretical particle physicist of his generation. Despite his youth, he has become a leader in the field, creating subfields with each new idea. He now splits his time between studying fundamental issues with quantum theories of gravity and hands-on contributions to understanding in detail what we see at the LHC.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~peer/ParticleFever/nima.html