Like many kids in Canada, Robert Dynes spent his childhood playing ice hockey. He loved the sport so much that he almost made it a career.
Instead, he became the first in his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Western Ontario and a doctorate in physics before immigrating to America.
"It's sort of like the American dream except it started in Canada," said Raymond Jeanloz, a physics professor at UC Berkeley.
Jeanloz said professors appreciated that Dynes continued to do research and has published scholarly papers even as he ran UC San Diego.
"Many of us have found that we call him in his lab rather than his office. That brings a huge appreciation from those of us doing the scholarly work."
Dynes, an expert in semiconductors and superconductors, spent 22 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories before returning to the college world in 1991 as a professor of physics at UC San Diego.
In 1996, he was named chancellor of the university, while maintaining his faculty work.
"It's amazing that while leading a major campus, he's managed to keep in touch with details of the university's essential work of research and teaching, " Jeanloz said.
While keeping his hand in science, Dynes led UC San Diego to a 25 percent increase in enrollment. Outreach to schools in the area was expanded and spending on research increased 36 percent. Nearly $500 million was also raised through a fund-raising campaign during his tenure as head of the campus.
Jeanloz said Dynes has been respected for his work as a prominent adviser for the nation's national laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore, home of U. S. nuclear weapons development among other research fields.
"In that area, he's shown a lot of vision and energy and has been very thoughtful," Jeanloz said.
A naturalized American citizen, he won the top honor for low-temperature physics in 1990, the Fritz London Award, and serves on the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dynes is married to Frances Dynes Hellman, a UC San Diego physics professor and expert on magnetic and superconducting materials. He has one daughter from a previous marriage and two grandchildren.
He's also a jogger and golf enthusiast, while his wife is an avid soccer player, he told the regents. They both enjoy the theater, he added.
His mother was a nursery school and kindergarten teacher and his father ran a small business selling shoes, he said. He came to the United States in 1968 intending to stay only two years but remained because of the opportunities he found.
His commitment to education, he said, was forged by those opportunities as well as the schooling he received in Canada, which trumped his early sports ambition.
Saying he "went to college almost by accident," he recalled:
"I was more interested in sports than I was in academics. I had dreams of being a professional hockey player. But a lot of pressure from my mother and some high school teachers convinced me my life would be better served if I went to college than try and fail at professional sports."