NAIR Chandra

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.