Prof Kenneth Dawson attributes an unselfish gesture many years ago at Queen's University, Belfast, to his ground-breaking career in the world of physical chemistry.

Back then, as a naive young Northerner, Prof Dawson would happily have stayed at Queen's working under his mentor, Prof John Rooney. But the latter had greater plans for his protege, and wrote his letter of application to Oxford University.

So began a career that saw Prof Dawson becoming the youngest Weir fellow at Oxford for several hundred years. He later topped this with a Lindemann fellowship - a British honour conferred on just one student every two years - to conduct research in the US. By that stage he was happy to leave Oxford, having always felt like an outsider in terms of economic and social background.

"It was a horrendously strange experience. Everybody around me was very rich, and I was very naive. Instead I immersed myself in work because I couldn't afford to do anything else."

At one point it was suggested to him that he should change his accent to further his career. "I swore at that stage I'd run those bastards off their feet through my own success. It instilled a strong will in me to rail against obstacles and prejudice. It riles me when I see it - whatever the form," he says, in clear northern tones.

Now aged 40, he is Professor of Physical Chemistry at University College, Dublin, and the founder of the National Centre for Colloid Science and Biomaterials. Since his return from the US to join the staff at UCD five years ago, he has ensured his research students retain ownership and control of their research and the commercial opportunities they generate.

"Traditional hierarchies will not support the emerging structures. Young owner-directors will drive future business. If universities try to cream it off and create hierarchies there is no incentive for creative people to stay," he says.

The advantages of a flat structural model within academia struck Prof Dawson during the seven years he worked in the US, from 1987. On arrival in Cornell University in New York, he found himself freed of the class-based structure. He believed there was a new field of material science to be developed and approached three of the most respected scientists in the field of soft matter and asked to join them.

They were Prof Kenneth Wilson, a Nobel prize winner for physics; Prof Michael Fisher, winner of the Wolf Medal (second only to the Nobel prize); and Prof Benjamin Widom, who effectively led the team through many innovations.

For the first time, Prof Dawson says, he fully understood what science was about. "I clearly remember about five months into the project, the magic day when the other three invited me to join them in their daily science chat. Until then I had simply been solving problems they handed me. That was my official entry into the science community, and I discovered it was a completely flat structured area. It was a whole new feeling for me."

Over three years the team developed the first self-assembly model of molecular structures, which marked a crossroads in the understanding of liquid crystals and biological membranes. With the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leading US universities making chase, the Cornell team kept the edge and Prof Dawson went on to win several prizes in the field.

"It was a very American thing to be deemed hot property, so suddenly the focus was on me. I was offered professorships from countless US universities, but I had to keep remembering all I had done was one thing, and retain some kind of value system."

He took up the position of Professor of Biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, and was simultaneously appointed its Professor of Physical Chemistry.

Within days of his arrival there, he received his first visit from government representatives and the IDA, who were trying to woo valuable intellectual resources back to Ireland. "They said things were changing, and I believed them, because I wanted to be convinced."

Meanwhile, for continuing success in the colloid field Dawson won the Packard prize and fellowship in 1990. The $500,000 (£337,000) prize, sponsored by the late David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, included an invitation to Packard's west coast home near Monterey. There, Packard gathered various academic luminaries and spoke to them about his vision for innovation. "He told us it is possible to create beautiful science and really innovate at the same time. We shouldn't be steeped in applied research but should be creating new industries. Suddenly that became the vehicle to come home."

This and a visit from the then president of UCD finally persuaded him to return. In 1993, he took up his position as Professor of Physical Chemistry on the basis that he could also establish a Centre for Colloid Science and Biomaterials. Two months ago the first campus spinoff, Cell Media, signed a contract with leading scientific and medical publishers, Springer-Verlag, to develop electronic 3-D textbooks. Its first product, the Dynamic Cell, uniquely depicts the activities and complex processes typical of the biological cell on screen. Advance sales alone have almost recouped the $1 million which Springer-Verlag invested in the product's development.

The colloid centre's latest company, Intelligent Biomaterials, is almost ready to make its commercial launch. Operating in a niche market, it uses a combination of biotechnology, new materials and self assembly to develop novel so-called intelligent materials. These materials have the ability to sense their environment and respond to it in the same manner as real living tissue behaves. There are obvious extensions of this application in organ repair, where synthetic tissue can be harvested and grown.

While Prof Dawson takes a stake in each of the commercial projects, he has committed to taking a hands-off approach once a company launches. Reminiscent of the flat structure he embraced at Cornell, he believes the research graduates should reap exactly what they sow. His challenge now is to root the centre's platforms deep in the medical device industry.

"If I can produce a stream of companies which innovate in high-tech industries, led by young postgraduates who are owner-managers, then that is my goal."