Professor Bardos retired in 1993. During his 33 year UB career, Professor Bardos coauthored more than 200 peer-reviewed chapters and papers on cancer chemotherapy including work on anti-metabolites and dual antagonists. His research attracted several prestigious awards including Fellowship in the New York Academy of Science (1970), the 1971 Ebert Prize of the American Pharmaceutical Association, and the 1974 Jacob F. Schoellkopf Medal of the Western New York ACS for his contributions to chemotherapeutic treatment of cancer. In 1983 he was elected honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest). Since his retirement, he received the new designations "MRSC" from the Royal Society of Chemistry (London, 2001) and "Visionary Innovator" from UB (STOR, for licensing an invention in 2004).

In addition to numerous invited seminar presentations at different universities and research labs in the US and Europe, he was a participant in several international symposia on nucleic acids and cancer, and he was invited for lecturing tours in their countries by the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (1969), the Australian Chemical Institute (1969, 1971) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1984), respectively. At his UB lab, he directed the thesis research of a total of 32 PhD candidates and the research projects of 38 postdoctoral associates. In 1995 he initiated and partially sponsored an award program at the Amer. Assoc. for Cancer Research (AACR) for the nationwide selection of 10 (per year) of the most talented advanced undergraduate students to promote their interest and training in cancer research. This on-going and apparently successful program was more recently named AACR-Thomas J. Bardos Science Education Awards. Another undergraduate award was created at the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in honor of the memory of the late Dean Daniel H. Murray.