They returned to Cambridge in 1936 but the following year Chandra joined the faculty of the University of Chicago where he remained working for the rest of his life. He first worked at the Yerkes Observatory, which was part of the University of Chicago in Wisconsin. He later moved to work on the university campus in Chicago. During World War II he worked in the ballistics research laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Numerous reports, written in 1943, showed the problems he was working on at the time. The first involves the decay of plane shock waves and the second is the normal reflection of a shock wave. He was appointed Morton D Hull Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago in 1952. But by this time Chandra had been working in the United States for 15 years and neither he nor his wife had obtained citizenship before. However, both became American citizens the following year and became very integrated into the life of the country. When Chandra was offered a professorship at Cambridge in 1964, he was not interested, so he turned down a job that he would have accepted at a young age.