Chandra Nair's 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.

Chandra Nair got his Bachelor's degree from IIT Madras (India) and his master's and Ph.D. from Stanford. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and is currently a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Information theory society. He received the 2016 Information Theory Society paper award for developing a novel way to establish optimality of Gaussian distributions.

Chandra Nair is a Professor with the Information Engineering department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as the Programme Director of the undergraduate program in Mathematics and Information Engineering.