LA JOLLA - Robert Dynes is about to assume one of academia's most powerful positions.

Some, including his wife, express surprise that the internationally renowned scientist and chancellor of UC San Diego would want to take on the University of California presidency.

When Dynes isn't running UC San Diego, he's deep into his disheveled physics lab in a quiet corner of campus researching the local oscillation of electrons within a superconductor and other esoterica that to nonscientists looks like chicken scratches on his blackboard.

As president, he will largely give up the physics experiments he has squeezed into his chancellor's schedule for seven years.

Instead, in October he will take leadership of a prestigious 10-campus system in fiscal crisis. The highly political position requires a lot of face time with the California Legislature. He will have to make tough, probably unpopular decisions, such as whether to restrict enrollment because of deep budget cuts.

"The university must maintain its strength and quality," Dynes said. "UC is in my view the heart and soul of California; this is where the new leaders come from."

His commitment to such an administrative role leaves some people scratching their heads.

"I, first of all, regard him as an outstanding scientist," said Horst Stormer, a Nobel Prize physicist at Columbia University and former colleague at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

"People like that, who have a passion for what they're doing, most often are not willing to get into the nitty-gritty of administration. It's a tough job. It's dealing with people who are sensitive. You've heard the expression, particularly in academia, that being a department chair is like herding cats."

If a department chairman must contend with a passel of independent minds, imagine running an academic behemoth like UC.

Dynes knows what he's doing.

"I came to the realization that there are some things that I could do as chancellor and could do as president of the most powerful university in the world that can have far greater impact, than I can have as a bench scientist."

Dynes, 60, has his jacket off in a small office littered with papers and empty water bottles just outside his lab. It reflects the "Call me Bob" character colleagues and friends describe. (He has another, more official chancellor's office.)

Among the family photos on his desk, he has a goofy one of a Stanford professor flipping the bird during Dynes' 1998 wedding to his second wife, Frances Hellman, also a UC-San Diego physicist.

A Canadian native, Dynes is a product of humble beginnings. His father managed a shoe store in London, Ontario, and his mother taught nursery school, kindergarten and first grade.

Before becoming the first in his family to attend college, he seriously considered professional hockey. But with encouragement from his mother and high school teachers, he enrolled at McMaster University in Ontario and later at the University of Western Ontario for graduate school.

Then he began his career at Bell Labs, a nexus for the nation's top scientists. He became a star and won the prestigious Fritz London Memorial Prize. He spent 22 years at Bell before leaving for UC San Diego in 1990.

Four years after arriving in La Jolla, he became chairman of the physics department, senior vice chancellor of academic affairs a year after that and chancellor the following year.

His quick rise speaks to his brilliance, said vice chancellor for marine sciences Charles Kennel, and to his unassuming character and ability to put people at ease by expressing himself in clear, simple terms.

Many say that quality will serve him well in Sacramento as he tries to explain to an increasingly fractious Legislature the importance of what the university does.

"He doesn't relate in a hierarchical fashion," said Joel Dimsdale, head of the UC San Diego Academic Senate. "He's singularly approachable."

But the job will still be a challenge, said Kennel. "He has his work cut out for him."

In his years at UC San Diego, Dynes has alienated very few people. In the one highly publicized instance when he did -- a provost threatened to resign -- he built consensus in what was a tough, emotional issue on campus until that person came back on board.

The controversy centered around developing a public charter school for disadvantaged students, an unusual project for a research university. The faculty voted it down, and Dynes agreed. He charged the faculty with reworking the idea, and they did.

"(Dynes) never tried to polarize the situation or attack those who differed from him," said Marsha Chandler, now San Diego's acting chancellor. "It was more about how to forge a consensus to allay the concerns."

In more than a dozen interviews with students, staff and faculty, no one had anything particularly negative to say. Kennel came up with this: Dynes doesn't micromanage and trusts his people to do their jobs. As a result, he does not talk about routine campus issues.

"You often wish you had more of his attention," Kennel said.

In its short life span of 44 years, UC San Diego has become one of the nation's top research universities. For all its cutting-edge science, it has a whimsical air born of the free spirit that fosters its scientific discoveries.

A big stone serpent slithers up to the UC San Diego library. The names of seven vices and seven virtues are wrapped in neon around the top of another building.

San Diego offers up the campus as a canvas to acclaimed artists and puts few boundaries on what they create, said UC San Diego spokeswoman Winifred Cox.

This quality has attracted scientists and faculty, with its promise of freedom to build careers and departments in an unrestricted environment. Dynes was drawn to this, and it reflects his leadership style.

The can-do attitude has garnered admiration in the university system. UC San Diego has developed creative revenue sources such as building a conference hotel and a science research park.

The campus has kept pace with tremendous growth that will take it from 20,000 students to 30,000 in 2007. That same growth has fueled the hiring of some of the hottest young stars in academia, in which Dynes takes particular pride.

UC San Diego tied MIT for third in the nation last year for the number of academic citations in research papers, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.

The campus, composed of small colleges in a system modeled on Oxford University in England, just established an unusual sixth college that combines technology, art and culture.

Still, fostering innovation on one campus is different from running a university system with the politics that permeates it, said physics professor John Goodkind. "I don't think he's been tested in that aspect of the job."

The University of California system, which boasts 44 Nobel laureates, has entered dark days.

The Legislature slashed its budget by $410 million last week just as it confronts enormous enrollment growth. There has been talk of the university breaking its 43-year-old promise to admit all eligible students.

At his first board of regents meeting since his appointment, the regents voted to raise fees by 25 percent, an increase now risen to 30 percent.

In the remaining months before he takes over, Dynes has visited the regents individually to learn what's important to them. He ate a grilled-cheese sandwich with Regent Odessa Johnson in Modesto and sat down with Ward Connerly in Sacramento.

Their foremost concern, he said, is maintaining the university's quality. If it's necessary to restrict enrollment, Dynes will.

"We cannot continue to grow in student body and shrink in budget. It's unstable."

In addition, the University of California, longtime manager of the Los Alamos Laboratory, must decide whether to compete for the job, which the Department of Energy has opted to put out to bid because of management problems.

Dynes is inclined to compete for the contract as long as the terms are favorable, but he won't say definitively until he sees them.

Dynes' leadership style is not his only quality people hope will pull the university through this difficult time.

His wife, who grew up in New York, is from a prominent family with San Francisco roots. Some San Diego faculty say Dynes' access to that financial community will help UC in fund-raising and developing sophisticated financing.

"It's clear the present financial arrangements with the state and the university are coming apart, and something new has to be done," Kennel said.

It won't be easy for Dynes to leave the San Diego campus. He will have to fly back to San Diego on weekends to shepherd his graduate students. Hellman is negotiating to move her lab to Berkeley. The two are big-time Padres fans; they haven't picked a Bay Area team yet.

Hellman, a friendly, avid soccer player, takes part in the popular annual chancellor's 5-kilometer run in which they both pledge donations for students who beat them. Dynes has his running numbers plastered on a lab wall. Some would like to see him hold president's 5K races at all the campuses.

Scientists set up controlled experiments and then observe the results. This is where Dynes diverges from many of his fellows. Chancellors don't get to control all the variables, and neither do university presidents. There aren't neat, tidy results.

"Bob doesn't want to control everything," Kennel said. "He wants to see what interesting things happen."