Formal biography (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.
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 IEEE 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 at Microsoft Research, he resolved several conjectures associated with the Random Energy Model approximation of the Number Partition Problem.
Chandra Nair earned his B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, 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). He was subsequently 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 CUHK.
He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2014–2016) and as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2017–2018). A Fellow of the IEEE, he was a plenary speaker at the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. He currently serves as the Programme Director of the undergraduate programme in Mathematics and Information Engineering (MIEG).
For a full curriculum vitae please see the full CV (PDF) or short resume (PDF).
Education
Professional experience
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>Assistant Professor, 2007–2013
>Associate Professor, 2013–2019
>Professor, 2019–present
Honours and professional service
Honours and awards
| 2016 | IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, for the paper "The capacity region of the two-receiver vector Gaussian broadcast channel with private and common messages" (with Y. Geng). |
| 2018 | Fellow, IEEE. |
| 2021 | Plenary speaker, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Melbourne. |
| 2017–18 | Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Information Theory Society. |
| 2004–05 | Microsoft Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University. |
| 2000–04 | Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Stanford University. |
| 1999 | Philips India and Siemens India awards for outstanding academic performance, IIT Madras. |
Editorial and committee service
| 2014–16 | Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. |
| ongoing | Technical Programme Committee member, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), multiple years. |
Useful links
| Full CV (PDF) |
| Short resume (PDF) |
| Google Scholar profile |
| Department faculty profile |