Chetan Nayak has made significant contributions to the theory of topological phases, high-temperature superconductivity, ‘strange metals’, the effects of impurities on electronic behavior, the quantum Hall effect, and phases of periodically-driven quantum systems. In 1996, Chetan and Frank Wilczek discovered the type of non-Abelian statistics associated with Majorana zero modes. His subsequent work in 2005 with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma sparked attempts to build a topological quantum computer using the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state. In 2008, he was the lead author of an influential article surveying the field of topological quantum computing. In 2016, he repaired and revived the concept of a “time crystal” with Dominic Else and Bela Bauer and predicted its occurrence in periodically-driven systems, which was experimentally verified shortly thereafter.