Dr. Peter Lykos

Professional Interests

Computers in chemistry, quantum chemistry, and chemistry education (especially physical chemistry).

Experience

At IIT 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 Cal Tech 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 created the IIT Interactive Instructional Television system (IITV).  IITV achieved self-sufficiency with his marketing effort that brought 17 remote industrial and national lab sites on board over 17 months. That promotional effort included finding an important-to-IIT new Trustee.

He also arranged for a proof-of-concept location for an IIT satellite campus, IIT West, at the College of DuPage in the western suburbs of Chicago. The success of IIT West over just five semesters led to the current Rice Campus in Wheaton, IL.

He conceived of and brought into being major IIT-centered "computers in education" projects including outreach programs involving ten other colleges while engaged in cooperative efforts in computer-based course development over eight disciplines.  In addition, Lykos brought into existence a massive IIT-centered program of bringing computing to many thousands of high school students and teachers from all over metro Chicago that spawned the first-ever Master of Science for Teachers in Computer Science (MST/CS).

Lykos has had many off-campus activities.  He moved the College Board to create the Advanced Placement Exam in Computer Science and, while Chair of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, also moved the Association for Computing Machinery to create the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (with the IEEE-CS).

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).

Appointed to the American Chemical Society Committee on Professional Training (where he served for three consecutive terms), he moved the ACS/CPT to augment its "Guidelines for Approval of a Bachelor Degree in Chemistry" by extracting a core of 28 semester-hours in organic, inorganic, analytical and physical chemistries and by creating interdisciplinary options such as in biochemistry, environmental chemistry, materials chemistry, and others, supported by important conferences at national ACS Meetings.  Since that initiative in 1985, CPT has approved some 100 new inter-disciplinary chemistry bachelor degree programs.

Another ACS activity of note is with the Chicago Section of the ACS (membership of about 6,000). Early on Lykos accepted chairmanship of the education committee. He restructured it into four subcommittees (K-12, college, graduate and continuing) - all with a budget. Lykos also organized a one-day conference at IIT focused on computers in the research laboratory with detailed proceedings that were widely distributed. When ACS President Pimentel instituted National Chemistry Week, Lykos arranged for a National Chemistry Day (NCD) celebration at IIT under his original theme, Chemists Are The Human Element. Subsequently Lykos has once again arranged for IIT to host the (Fall 2003) NCD celebration in anticipation, from immediately preceding such, of participation by 800 high school chemistry students and 200 volunteers - many of them high school chemistry teachers.

Two other National ACS activities of note are: (1) creation of the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) in 1974 that is averaging some 300 technical papers at the semiannual ACS National Meetings and (2) creation of the Materials Chemistry Secretariat in 1991 (MTLS) that involves 14 ACS Divisions as an association. MTLS conducts symposia of from 30 to 60 papers at all Fall ACS National Meetings.  As Secretariats were at that time not well defined in the ACS, the Articles of Agreement Lykos designed for MTLS have become the standard for Secretariat formation in the ACS.

In 1971 Lykos organized what turned out to be the first (hosted by Northern Illinois University) of a series of biennial weeklong International Conferences on Computers in Chemical Research and Education (ICCCRE).   The conferences have been held all over the world, with the XIIth having taken place January 1998 in Pune, India.

Publications

Lykos has some 70 publications in journals ranging from the Journal of Chemical Physics to the Journal of Chemical Education and including six books he edited on aspects of computers and chemistry, two of which were published by John Wiley and four by the Books Division of the American Chemical Society.

At the invitation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) based in Paris, France, Lykos created a 155-page report, The Computer's Role in Undergraduate Chemistry Curricula, that UNESCO sent to 300 universities and other scientific organizations in developing countries.  In response to individual requests, another 500 copies went to developed countries.

Recent M.S. and Ph.D. Theses include:

1.   Understanding a New Path to Benzene in Flames, X. Jiang, IIT M.S. Thesis, May 1991.

2.  Study of Interaction Between Amyloid Associated Proteins, Glycoaminoglycans and Inhibitors, X. Jiang, Ph.D. Thesis, December 1995 (co-advisor Dr. F. Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory).

3.  Finding Protein Coding Regions in Prokaryotic DNA Sequences, G-H Chen, M.S. Thesis, May 1994 (co-advisor, R. Overbeek, Argonne National Laboratory).

4.  Structure-Based Annealing Algorithm for Ligand Design for Receptors, P. Zielinski, Ph.D. December 1994 (co-advisor C. Hutchins, Abbott Labs).  Note: This is an open-ended project that would be a good project for those interested in computational chemistry and drug design.

Inter-Professional Projects (IPRO)

In 1995 IIT instituted a new requirement; namely:  that all bachelor degree programs require completion of IPRO activity.  IPROs involve three semester-hours of work in teams of 5-10 students from at least three different disciplines.  Lykos began an extensive involvement with IPROs with activities spanning Building an Electronic Nose, then A Portable Electronic Nose, and a scientific conference involving six off-campus speakers addressing Exploring Human Consciousness.  He went on to create and conduct IPROs on Electric Vehicles (the first IPRO of its kind with subsequent spin-offs), Robotics, and Monitoring At-Home Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Patients, done jointly with staff from Hines Veterans Hospital in the Chicago area.

Mentoring

Students wishing to focus on an interdisciplinary area overlapping strongly with chemistry and/or on any of a wide variety of focuses important in society where computers and chemistry overlap can be certain of well-informed mentoring and guidance at IIT.    Also, as is apparent from the theses described above, we are well connected with major R&D organizations in the metro Chicago area.

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