Kantowski received his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote a dissertation on cosmological models.
He was hired by the Physics & Astronomy department of the University of Oklahoma in 1968, where he became a full professor in 1981.
Besides the Kantowski–Sachs solutions to the Einstein's field equations, Kantowski's second widely recognized contribution to cosmology was developing the now used theory of transparent gravitational lenses.
This theory was completed some four years before multiply imaged quasars were detected.
His recent research has centered on issues of mass inhomogeneities and topological quantum field theories.