ABOUT ME
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
I did my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institue of Technology (IIT), Madras in electrical engineering graduating in 1999. Concurrently, I also completed the four year nurture programme in Mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) under the auspices of the National Board of Higher Mathematics (NBHM).
I received a Masters (2002) and PhD (2005) in electrical engineering from Stanford University. The title of my dissertation was Proofs of the Parisi and Coppersmith-Sorkin conjectures in the random assignment problem (PDF), and Balaji Prabhakar was my advisor.
From Summer 2005-Summer 2007 I spent two wonderful years in Redmond as a post-doc with the theory group at Microsoft Research.
Current:
Since Fall 2007 I have been a faculty member (Assistant Professor 2007-2013, Associate Professor 2013-2019, Professor 2019- ) with the Information Engineering (IE) department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. From August 2014 I have been serving as the Programme Director of the interdisciplinary undergraduate programme on Mathematics and Information Engineering (MIEG). I have served as an Assistant Director (Fall 2008-Fall 2017) and as the Director (Fall 2017 - Fall 2019) of the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science and Communication (ITCSC) .
BIOGRAPHY (formal - third person)
Chandra Nair is a Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests and contributions focus on developing ideas, tools, and techniques to address families of combinatorial and non-convex optimization problems, primarily within the information sciences.
More recently, his research has concentrated on examining the optimality of certain inner and outer bounds of capacity regions for fundamental problems in multiuser information theory. These investigations are closely connected to the sub-additivity properties of specific information functionals, motivating him to explore information inequalities from a broader perspective, particularly those at the intersection of functional analysis and additive combinatorics.
In 2016, he received the Information Theory Society Paper Award for introducing a novel method to establish the optimality of Gaussian distributions in a class of non-convex optimization problems arising in multiuser information theory. His doctoral dissertation provided proofs of the Parisi and Coppersmith–Sorkin conjectures related to the Random Assignment Problem. During his postdoctoral tenure, he resolved several conjectures associated with the Random Energy Model approximation of the Number Partition Problem.
Chandra Nair earned his Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, India, where he was honored with the Philips India and Siemens India awards for outstanding academic performance. He pursued graduate studies at Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering, supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2000–2004) and the Microsoft Graduate Fellowship (2004–2005). Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher with the theory group at Microsoft Research, Redmond (2005–2007). Since the fall of 2007, he has been a faculty member of the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2014 to 2016 and as a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 2017 to 2018. A Fellow of the IEEE, he was also a plenary speaker at the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.
Currently, he serves as the Programme Director of the undergraduate program in Mathematics and Information Engineering.
For curriculum vitae, please click here.