He is grandson of Sheikh Esmaeil Mahallatti, a philosopher and cleric.[1] His father was an engineer and his mother was a philanthropist.[1] His sister, Ghazali is a private landscape gardening consultant.[3] He went to high school in Tehran and entered the United States on scholarships that were not provided by Iranian government. He briefly attended Georgetown University, and then was graduated from University of California, Berkeley in physics, before entering PhD program of fluid physics at Yale.[1]