The ACS/CPT has been in existence for over 50 years. It sets standards for bachelor degree in chemistry programs. There are some 630 colleges and universities on its approved list. Some 300 are liberal arts colleges, 130 are universities with the MS as the highest degree while the remaining are universities awarding the PhD. In 1985 ACS/CPT broadened is approved program to allow for a BS in Chemistry with an Option in reaction to the fact that chemistry is becoming more and more interdisciplinary.

Some 10,000 BS in Chemistry degrees are granted every year. However, fewer than half are certified that the recipients have indeed completed the approved program. Also Biology, Physics and Mathematics do not have an approval or certification program in place. The ACS/CPT was used as a model to persuade the computing societies to create an accreditation program for BS in Computer Science. ACS/CPT publishes an annual report on the degree production of all 630 departments. www.acs.org is a source of more information about CPT.

At IIT Peter Lykos has engaged in the usual activities of a Professor of Physical Chemistry. He has taught undergraduate physical chemistry over many years, created a set of four senior courses in complementary aspects of computers and chemistry, created new graduate courses in aspects of physical chemistry, and served on many departmental committees that led to major revisions and upgrades of undergraduate and graduate curricula. He has guided many undergraduates and graduate students in research activities as well as postdoctoral research associates. Martin Kilpatrick, who recruited Lykos, shared his dream of the potential of IIT to become the Caltech of the Midwest. He took an extremely modest Chemistry Department and elevated it to the status of 25 tenured and tenure track faculty with a major focus on research and teaching. In gratitude and in honor of his achievement Lykos raised $120,000 to endow and to support into perpetuity the annual Kilpatrick Lecture Series.

On a campus-wide basis he served as Associate Dean for Academic Planning in the Armour College of Engineering and Science. He has served in several elective offices including chair of the Faculty Council on two occasions. In addition, Lykos created the IIT computer science department (from startup to 35 undergraduate and graduate courses, the fifth-largest academic program (credit-hour production) of 25 IIT departments), and the IIT computer center (including migrations across five increasingly powerful mainframe computer platforms).

Lykos was elected a member at large of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences and appointed Chair of the newly formed Committee on Computers in Chemistry. While so positioned, he took advantage of being in Washington, DC, for two years as a Rotator at the NSF creating the Computer Impact on Society Section, to lead a national movement to create the National Resource for Computation in Chemistry (at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California).