She is currently a Professor at the Department of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science and additionally affiliated with Bioengineering and Mathematical biology initiatives at the Institute.

Dr. Chandra has over 160 publications in international journals of high standing. She holds several research grants, serves on national and international committees and interacts extensively with the industry. She is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Her work involves an integration of structural biology, bioinformatics and systems biology, navigating upwards in a systems-scale with structural-level resolution, for studying several aspects of disease diagnosis, mechanisms and drug treatment. A contribution from her work is to decipher an emergent vulnerability in drug resistance in mycobacteria and identification of a strategic drug combination that tackles the mechanism and reverses resistance. Another contribution is the discovery of biomarker signatures for tuberculosis and cancer. Her group has developed a suite of algorithms, which detect, match and align binding sites in protein structures, useful for probing new ideas in drug discovery. She has also contributed to theoretical immunology and has shown for the first time that large populations can be grouped into a few response-types, useful for predicting disease susceptibility.