Arkani-Hamed's parents are both physicists from Iran. His father, Jafar Arkani-Hamed, a native of Tabriz, Azerbaijan (Iran), was chairman of the physics department at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran (Iran), and later taught earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal.
Arkani-Hamed graduated from the University of Toronto with a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1993, and went to the University of California, Berkeley, for his graduate studies, where he worked under the supervision of Lawrence Hall. The majority of his graduate work was on studies of supersymmetry and flavor physics. His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "Supersymmetry and Hierarchies." He completed his Ph.D. in 1997 and went to SLAC at Stanford University for post-doctoral studies. During this time he worked with Savas Dimopoulos and developed the paradigm of large extra dimensions.
In 1999 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley physics department. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley to visit Harvard University beginning January 2001. Shortly after arriving at Harvard he worked with Howard Georgi and Andrew Cohen on the idea of emergent extra dimensions, dubbed dimensional deconstruction. These ideas eventually led to the development of little Higgs theories.
He officially joined Harvard's faculty in the fall of 2002. Arkani-Hamed has appeared on various television programs and newspapers talking about space, time and dimensions and the current state of theoretical physics. In 2003 he won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society, and in the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the 'Phi Beta Kappa' award for teaching excellence. He appeared in the 2013 documentary film Particle Fever.
Arkani-Hamed participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.
In 2008 Arkani-Hamed won the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize given at Tel Aviv University to young scientists who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in Physical Science.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In 2010 Arkani-Hamed gave the Messenger lectures at Cornell University.
He was a Professor of Physics at Harvard University from 2002–2008, and is now a Faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Nima Arkani-Hamed also was chosen for being a member of The Selection Committee for the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed
