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 with the Information Engineering department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests and contributions have been in developing ideas, tools, and techniques to tackle families of combinatorial and non-convex optimization problems arising primarily in the information sciences.
His recent research focus has been on studying the optimality of certain inner and outer bounds to capacity regions for fundamental problems in multiuser information theory. He received the 2016 Information Theory Society paper award for developing a novel way to establish the optimality of Gaussian distributions for a class of non-convex optimization problems arising in multiuser information theory. A proof of the Parisi and Coppersmith-Sorkin conjectures in the Random Assignment Problem was his doctoral dissertation; and he resolved some conjectures related to Random Energy model approximation of the Number Partition Problem during his post-doctoral years.
Chandra Nair got his Bachelor's degree, B.Tech(EE), from IIT Madras (India) where he received the Philips (India) and Siemens (India) award for the best academic performance. Subsequently he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow (00-04) and a Microsoft Graduate Fellow (04-05) during his graduate studies at the EE department of Stanford University. Later, he became a post-doctoral researcher (05-07) with the theory group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He has been a faculty member of the Information Engineering department at The Chinese university of Hong Kong since Fall 2007. He was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2014-2016) and a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Information theory society (2017-2018). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
He serves as the Programme Director of the undergraduate program on Mathematics and Information Engineering.
For curriculum vitae, please click here.