Clifford E. Dykstra received B.S. degrees in chemistry and in physics from the University of Illinois in 1973. He received his PhD in 1976 from the University of California at Berkeley. He then joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Illinois. He was at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from 1990 to 2006, where he served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs for four years and where he was named Chancellor's Professor in 2001. He was Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Illinois State University from 2006 through 2009, and then returned to the University of Illinois. He served on the Editorial Board of Chemical Physics Letters for 21 years, and has been Editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure-Theochem, now Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, since 1993.