As a teenager, he won $500 in a regional Rubik's Cube tournament, which he promptly blew on records.

As a young chemist a decade ago, it was DNA, on which he published extensively and has spun off technology leading to 19 issued or pending patents.

Now 43 and UNC-Chapel Hill's next chancellor, Thorp has a new set of challenges. He will grapple with fundraising, a growing student body, the creation of a new campus, and pledges to keep the doors open to all qualified students, regardless of income.

He'll probably work quickly. He solved that Rubik's Cube in about a minute. He finished five years of doctoral work in three. He blazed from assistant to full professor in just six years at UNC-CH. Since 2001, he has climbed the university ladder with lightning speed, from planetarium director to chemistry chairman to dean to chancellor.

"It's a phenomenal ascent," said Joe DeSimone, a fellow UNC-CH chemist and entrepreneur. "He is a complete package."

In Thorp, UNC-Chapel Hill gets both a classic lab rat and a Renaissance man. He holds a prestigious Kenan professorship and is also a musician who dabbles in jazz and rock 'n' roll; he once took his 10-year-old son to a Pink Floyd concert.

Thorp is earnest and self-assured, with boundless ambition and a dry wit. At his core, he thinks science is cool and wants young people to become addicted to it. This is something he fosters in his chemistry classes.

Thorp guided doctoral students but also taught introduction to chemistry in lecture halls with 400 undergraduates. In class, he demonstrated a chemical reaction by lighting hair spray to propel a potato through PVC piping.

"I wanted them to get excited about chemistry," he said. "I guess I was a believer that if they came to class, they'd learn more, and so I wanted to make sure I gave them a good reason to be there."

'I just wanted to learn'

The potato gun was a bit of theatrics traceable to his childhood.

Born and raised in Fayetteville, Thorp spent a lot of time at the Fayetteville Little Theatre, now the Cape Fear Regional Theatre. His mother, Bo Thorp, founded it 47 years ago and still runs it.

There, he worked the lighting, which kept him up late on school nights. He later took on the music for the performances.

As a child, he moved from one challenge to the next. One Christmas morning he unwrapped a chemistry set.

"By the end of Christmas Day, he had discovered something," Bo Thorp recounted with a laugh.

A photography kit similarly captured his attention. When he developed his first photograph, he bellowed so loudly his mother still remembers the noise. He loved to write music, and would disappear into the basement of the family home, emerging only when the piece was complete.

"I was a project-oriented youngster," he said. "I just wanted to learn the new thing."

Having Thorp as a best friend was a blast, said Nick Robinson, Thorp's buddy since age 10 and now a lawyer in Pittsboro.

They won all the science fair competitions. They made movies .

Robinson was the actor. Thorp was the multitasking mastermind -- cameraman, writer, producer and editor. "It was kind of like having 100 friends because he can do so much," Robinson said.

One time around age 12, the boys made a film they called "The Chemistry Formula." In it, a child burns his hand working with a chemistry set. Angered, the child throws the set into a lake, from which a monster soon emerges to hunt the boy down.

"That's how it was with Holden," Robinson said. "You didn't just go to the movies; you made a movie, which is kind of how his whole life has played out. He's never failed at anything."

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