Kantardjieff, Katherine. Interview November 18th, 2025.

00:00:00Jennifer Fabbi: Hello, this is Jen Fabbi, and today I'm interviewing Dr. Katherine Kantardjieff for the California State University, San Marcos University Library Oral History Program. Today is November 18th, 2025, at 9:23 a.m. This interview is taking place on the CSU San Marcos campus in the Kellogg Library. Katherine, thank you so much for interviewing with me today--

00:00:22Katherine Kantardjieff: --Oh, it's my pleasure. My pleasure.

00:00:25Fabbi: So we'll start off. Can you tell me a little bit about your childhood and adolescence, for example, where you were born and a bit about your family?

00:00:35Kantardjieff: That is a great question. And I sometimes joke to--it's a joke with people when we travel because my other half, Bernhard, will often tell people I'm born in Hollywood, and they go all crazy like, she's born in Hollywood, 'cause--anyway. But I am born in Hollywood. I am very proud Bulgarian American. My parents and grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe after World War I and World War II. And so, I grew up in a very (culturally) rich community in East Hollywood that was filled with people who had immigrated to the United States. But it was--we had a very close-knit Bulgarian community in Los Angeles. And that led to all kinds of unique experiences as a child from my father having Bulgarian school and making sure everybody in the family could read, write Cyrillic and speak Bulgarian. I spoke Bulgarian at home until I went to kindergarten. It's rough now, but I can still read and write, which helped me as a chemist because I could read Russian and anything in Cyrillic. I danced in a dance group for five years, Balkan dancing. We were in the 1984 Olympic opening ceremony. And also, a unique experience being in the Bulgarian community is my grandparents--in Eastern Europe, the center of the community is the church, the Orthodox church. And so they raised money to buy land. And then my parents' generation were the architects and the construction people, who built a church in Hollywood. So we built a church at Bronson and Virginia near La Conte Junior High School (now Le Conte Middle School). And so, we laid a cornerstone, groundbreaking cornerstone. We had a youth group. We painted pews, dyed Easter eggs, made candles out of beeswax--we did all these unique things as part of our cultural experience. So I grew up very much immersed in that culture. It didn't come without problems. I mean, my father was very Old World classic Eastern Europe, kind of strict, you know, and I was the older daughter of the family, oldest in the family, the daughter. But we had a--it was a rich experience. And then the other part of my experience growing up in Los Angeles is that I'm a very proud graduate of Immaculate Heart High School. We are women of great heart, and I mentioned that, and I'll get emotional talking about it, but I just had my 50th with high school reunion in May. And ten years ago at our 40th anniversary or reunion, we raised money to renovate a classroom in one of the buildings to enable--technology enable it to support the modern pedagogy that we all use today. So we raised well in excess of $10,000 to renovate this classroom and then the overflow we put into a scholarship fund. Five years later was the pandemic. We couldn't meet in person, but for our 50th, we all came together once again. (Tearful) And we raised $12,000. I'm sorry, I get emotional.

00:03:30Fabbi: That's okay. Take your time.

00:03:30Kantardjieff: And it was this time for a project to support belonging and community, and it was to put new bleachers in the gym for assemblies and sporting events. And so we just surprised everybody because in one week we raised $12,000.

00:03:45Fabbi: That's amazing.

00:03:46Kantardjieff: It was about paying it back and paying it forward for the next generation. So anyway, sorry (laughter). As I get older, that happens.

00:03:54Fabbi: No need for an apology. Just take your time.

00:03:58Kantardjieff: I also mentioned I sang in the church choir for thirty-five years, too. My father was the choir director.

00:04:03Fabbi: Wow.

00:04:03Kantardjieff: And my brother has all his music that he's composed and transcribed now.

00:04:08Fabbi: So it's you and your brother?

00:04:10Kantardjieff: I have a younger brother, four years younger than me.

00:04:12Fabbi: Okay.

00:04:14Kantardjieff: But I have a big family.

00:04:16Fabbi: Okay. Do you want to talk more about your family?

00:04:17Kantardjieff: My immediate family at one point was about sixty people (laughter). Thanksgivings and Christmas were interesting. We still have a pretty large family, although it's extended now because my cousins have kids who have kids. It's hard to say when you have people who have grandkids. So we still have a big family. We're rather spread out. Most of us are still in California, but we're spread--a lot of us are now here in the San Diego area, which makes me happy. We have a few in the Bay Area and then we have a spattering of people in the Pacific Northwest.

00:04:52Fabbi: Nice. Okay. So moving on--

00:04:57Kantardjieff: Then I have family in Bulgaria I forgot to mention, too.

00:04:59Fabbi: Oh, okay, well do--

00:05:00Kantardjieff: --lots of family in Bulgaria.

00:05:01Fabbi: Okay. Do you get back there?

00:05:03Kantardjieff: I never visited.

00:05:04Fabbi: Okay.

00:05:04Kantardjieff: It was hard to do that at certain times because of politics, and then just in my travels, it was hard to do. I'd like to do it. But one of the things I've done since--I started during the pandemic and then I really picked it up during retirement is for my birthday, after I retired, I decided to do ancestry.com and do the DNA testing. And part of it was to prove my father right. That we're Bulgarian to the core, which I am for the most part. Part of it was maybe he's wrong, and we've got some other things in us, you know. But because I did that and then I did my heritage on top of that, I have picked up--I have been able to fill in my family tree 'cause I lost--a lot of it had gaps, especially from my father's side in Eastern Europe because records weren't kept, or records were destroyed during the war. So the fact that I've got a database now that I can look at, I have found all kinds of cousins, and I've still got a gap I gotta fix. But I've got, I don't know how many hundreds of people on my family tree now. So it's been really good to fill--that was my father's dream to make sure we knew our heritage in Europe. And he used to write a lot of stories. And what actually got me started on the journey with the family tree is, after the pandemic, my father was already in assisted living. And he was trying to get back to writing, but he was forgetting. And he'd call me at noon sometime--I could--you know, Provost then, but he calls it noon, Hi, how you doing? I can't remember my grandmother's name. And I thought, Oh gosh. My records are all back in--I was up in Cal State Monterey Bay at the time, and my records were all back here in Southern California, but I thought, I've gotta get this down somewhere because he's gonna' forget. So that's what really motivated me to do that. And I'm glad I did it. So, anyway. Sorry I interrupted you twice (laughter).

00:06:54Fabbi: This is your interview.

00:06:56Kantardjieff: Okay.

00:06:57Fabbi: I'm taking your lead. So--and we can definitely go back to anything that comes up about your family as we move on.

00:07:06Kantardjieff: Sure.

00:07:07Fabbi: So next, can you tell me about your formal education, which you talked about Immaculate Heart High School, but then including post-secondary--

00:07:19Kantardjieff: Yeah.

00:07:20Fabbi: --and your areas of academic focus?

00:07:24Kantardjieff: So I will begin with some humor in that I am schizophrenic academic in that I am a graduate of both the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). And I had the unmitigated gall going from undergrad to grad to drive through the UCLA campus with a USC sticker on the back window of my car. At Immaculate Heart I kind of narrowed down my choices of career path that I wanted. So growing up, initially I wanted to be an astronomer, a musician, or an oceanographer. I'm not good in the water, so that eliminated oceanographer. For a while. I wanted to be an astronaut. As a matter of fact, I was always late for school watching the rocket launches on television in the early Musician, I studied classical piano for ten years. But when I got to the end of my high school career, I had narrowed it down that I really liked chemistry in part 'cause my father's oldest sister, who had immigrated to Brazil after the war was a chemist. She worked for a company in São Paulo that was kind of like a L'Oreal-type company. And she came to visit us when I was ten. And I just, I thought she rocked it. She was just this cool lady, and she was a chemist, and I loved making things in the house. Years later, I told my mother that she and my dad should have bought me a chemistry kit when I was a kid. They didn't want to, they thought it was dangerous. And I said--because I improvised, I found things stored in the house, and I was mixing things in the kitchen and on the stove. And I said, knowing what I know now, it was not good. Anyway. I really liked chemistry, and I love cooking--till do--which is chemistry. But it was sort of focused towards medicine. And I really liked animals, and so my focus at that point was that I wanted to be a veterinarian and work in a zoo. As a matter of fact, my last two years of college, I worked at the Los Angeles Zoo as a zookeeper, which people say looks interesting on my resume but must have prepared me well for other things. But anyway, I worked at the zoo. So when I went off to USC, I was a chemistry major, but I was taking all the pre-med stuff. And the reason I chose chemistry is because at that time, which was the late seventies, biotech hadn't really taken off yet. And if you had a biology degree and you went to work in industry, which was my backup plan, you got retrained as a chemist. And I really liked chemistry, but I was taking all the bio classes for pre-med. So when I graduated from USC, my intention was to go to veterinary school, and the only--and I was restricted to apply at that time to the one in the state, which is up at Davis. And it's very competitive. And even though I'd worked at the zoo and I had the grades, I didn't--I hadn't enough hours working with animals. And so that was one of the thing--and I'm also not a very big person, so people look at me like, I don't think you can flip a cow over to give it, you know, Anyway, I didn't get into vet school. But again, some serendipity--and Immaculate Heart comes back into the picture--is that my brother was graduating the year that I graduated college, and he was invited to the commencement ceremonies for Immaculate Heart. He and his buddies had some friends. Well, we graduate from the Hollywood Bowl. And we don't wear caps and gowns. We wear white formals and carry red roses. So anyway, I went to the Hollywood Bowl, and afterwards I decided to go backstage to say hello to some people. So I went backstage. saying hello to the principal and some of my instructors. And so the chair of the math department, Natalie Ambrose, walks up to me. Now, Natalie was probably a head shorter than me, tough, stocky-like, and she looks at me and she goes (looks up), How'd you like to teach in the math department? (Laughter) And totally hit me out of the blue. But I thought, you know, as a kid, we always played school. And I was the teacher. And I thought, I need a job. I don't want to keep working at the zoo. I've decided I'm gonna' try human medicine, and I need to study up for the MCATs (Medical College Admission Test) and things. And so I decided to take a job at Immaculate Heart. So for one year at Immaculate Heart, I taught algebra and geometry, and I taught summer school. And they trained me how to teach really well. They'd come in your classroom and observe you. And anyway, I realized I had a passion for it, but also I had a flare for it. And so then, my mother was still very active at Daniel Murphy High School, where my brother went to school. And she said, the Dominican Brothers--they were mostly Dominicans, but there were also lay faculty. She said, they're looking for somebody to teach chemistry because Brother Jim was going somewhere else. And I said, oh. So she goes, you want to interview? And I said, sure. So I went over there to interview, and they hired me like that (snaps fingers). So not only so--and now I was teaching in my field, which is chemistry, but they didn't just hire me to teach chemistry. Now remember, I'm one year out of college, and I did not do any credentialing 'cause to teach in a private, you didn't need credentials. I was teaching chemistry, honors chemistry--not all the same yea--honors biology, physical science, physics. I was in seventh heaven. I love this stuff. And I was chair of the science department for the two years I was there. So, I mean, this was like baptism by fire, you know, but learned a lot, honed my skills. I did the MCATs. I did well, but not super well. I don't test well. I get nervous. And I thought, I really like this teaching business. But I realized that I was at a point where I was gonna' hit a ceiling, and I couldn't go any farther. And not that I didn't enjoy high school. I loved teaching high school. All these young people were wonderful, but I knew that I'd have more doors open to me if I had an advanced degree. I could always go back and teach high school. So that's when I decided to go to grad school. And I applied to UCLA and Caltech. I know this is gonna' be on the web, but I'll frame it the way it was. So I got accepted to both. I interviewed at Caltech, and at the time, there were very few women at Caltech. And it was just really uncomfortable--I mean, I felt I could do the work, but I didn't want the added weight of being the only woman in a lab, and I didn't see any women on the faculty. And so UCLA on the other hand had more people with whom I wanted to do research. I had more choices. There were more women, and they had a women's group of the graduate students that met once a month just for potluck and whatever, just to find out how everybody was doing. So I felt that I had more choices there, and I had the opportunity to have support. So I went to UCLA. So that's how I ended up at the other institution across town. So I was in grad school for a total of five years to work on my PhD. And I ended up doing research and earning my degree in an area that melded all my skills because I had a lot of biology background. I had a lot of chemistry background, and I loved physics. So I ended up with a PhD in physical chemistry. But my research and my passion has been, ever since, molecular structure, particularly macromolecules, which means proteins, DNA, things involved in health and wellbeing, biochemistry. And I ended up ultimately more focused on drug design and discovery, which also infused some computation in addition to experimental methods, which the experimental methods at the time was X-ray diffraction. Now it's gone into electron microscopy and electron diffraction. But that was--and it was still a burgeoning, somewhat burgeoning field at the time. We were always advancing methods and technology and things, and so I was always at the cutting edge of that, which was a lot of fun. And I realized that I was excited by the field. and at times I was the only woman in the lab, too, but it didn't matter. And when I was trying to decide what to do after that, it was either go into industry--and I had a job offer, but it was in Canada. And although it was really interesting--and then somebody wanted to interview me here in San Diego. Again, it was really interesting, but I really wanted the teaching part. I wanted the best of both worlds, and so I opted not to pursue the industry jobs. Ironically, the industry job would've been at a company run by Al Kern (laughter). So anyway, years later we laughed about that. He goes, yeah, I heard about you then. Anyway, I decided I didn't want to pursue an R1 (Doctoral Universities: Very High Research Activity) institution. I wanted to go to a primarily undergraduate institution and bring my research to the masses, quote unquote. So that's how I ended up at Cal State Fullerton, where I spent twenty years on the faculty. I'm probably diverging from your question now, but there I was able to do a lot because they were trying to build up a biochemistry program. I developed the physical chemistry course for that program. I developed a lot of innovative curriculum in computational chemistry and biology. And most importantly, I conceived, established, and directed the Keck Center for Molecular Structure there, which I moved around a couple of times. And I think that's one of the biggest things I was able to do because people supported it and enabled me to do cutting-edge things. I was the faculty coordinator for academic technology there for a while. And so, yeah, so I think that's one of the highlights of my career because it was also remotely enabled instruments. We had students all over the state and all over the country who were able to use our instrumentation to do things that they weren't able to do in the classroom or the lab before. And we even brought it into high school classrooms, too, so it was a lot of fun.

00:17:43Fabbi: That's so impressive. I'm gonna' go back a little bit to some things that you hit on especially around gender in the workforce. I mean, this is during a time when women in the workforce was just much less prevalent generally, but in the field of science, it sounds like you definitely stood out in terms of being a woman scientist especially working in some of the fields that you're talking about--physics and chemistry. Do you feel like that has impacted your career at all? Other than the decisions you made about your schooling--where you went to school--and also has that given you opportunities in the field?

00:18:36Kantardjieff: That's a great question. I would say that in the period that I came up the ranks, if you will, in my career, there were a lot of developments and doors opening, and I was astute to always take advantage of those doors when they opened. So that's number one. Number two, I think the education that I received at Immaculate Heart helped a lot. Because we were empowered with a courage of conviction, a strong sense of self. I mean, when I went to USC, there were times when I was the only woman in a physics lab, and my lab partner would try to do everything. And I just went to the TA (teaching assistant) or the instructor and said, Look, I'm not--how am I gonna' earn a grade if somebody else is doing my work? You know? So I had the courage to do that, and the strong sense of self meant that even though I was sometimes the only one in the lab, I still felt I belonged. I didn't, I wasn't intimidated by it. I never felt intimidated by it. Which is interesting 'cause some women do, but I didn't. And as the doors opened--to your point about how did it influence you--I kept wanting to move up, not for the sake of moving up and having some title. I wanted to move up because as I moved up the ranks, I would be in a position where I could change the rules--silly rules that were preventing people from advancing women in particular. And the color of somebody's skin--I don't know how to word it. It was irrelevant to me. If they were a woman and they were talented, they deserved to be there. I mentored young women. I ended up as the faculty advisor to a sorority at Fullerton even though I was never in a sorority. And I always kind of frowned on sororities. And then I realized they actually do some good (laughter). So yeah, one of my lab students asked me to be the faculty advisor. And I would often give talks. The RAs (research assistants) would often invite me to the dorms to give talks about women in science and whatnot. And then, I did encounter some weird things a couple of times. I'll share some comments anonymously. One was when I was when I was establishing the Center for Molecular Structure, and we were considering different vendors for instrumentation. People knew they were coming to meet Dr. Kantardjieff, and they had heard that I was a woman, but they had in their mind this image of what a woman scientist is supposed to look like. And the salesman said to me when he saw me, he goes, I expected somebody wearing dirndl skirt, bobby socks, and clogs or something. And I'm like, what? (Laughter) Because the other piece of this is--and somebody said to me once, you can just wear jeans and a t-shirt. And I said, I'm a professor. I'm not wearing jeans and a t-shirt. I still look younger than my students. Not anymore. So there were these weird comments like that. And I defied the stereotype, and I get that from my late mother, because my mother was a very--had an elegance to--she never went out without her suit or hat or jewel--I mean, she was always impeccably dressed. She did some modeling when she was younger. She sewed--she sewed everything when we were kids. I mean, nowadays you have the internet. We had the Sears Roebuck catalog and the catalog would come, and I'd be sitting there as a toddler on the couch pointing out things and bending corners on the pages 'cause these are the things I wanted my mom to buy, but she'd go out and buy the fabric and the pattern and she'd make me custom stuff. She taught me to sew. So I made myself suits when I had time and bathing suits and business suits and whatnot. I used to joke at professional talks. I'd say, If you want a bathing suit, let me know. I can whip off one in an hour. So I defied the stereotype because I didn't look the way people pictured. They pictured--what is that Muppet character, Bunsen Beaker or whatever, Dr. Bunsen or whatever? They expected me to have a lab coat, pens, calculat--you know, this. My friends who knew me well enough, when we'd go out and they'd introduce me to their friends were like guess what she does? And people were like are you in advertising? Are you in business? And we go, oh, no, no, no. What are you a rocket scientist? And I said, you're getting closer. You know, people would laugh. I always wanted to defy that stereotype, and I probably still do in some ways. But I just wanted to be me, and I didn't want to end up wearing a tweed suit and a bun, which doesn't look like me. It might look very well on somebody else, but that's not me. So, you know, wearing a suit with curly hair probably isn't considered professional by some people. But anyway, I just wanted to be me.

00:23:43Fabbi: I love that. So you talked about your path to becoming a faculty member at Fullerton, but maybe a little bit more about that time working with students and then how you progressed in your career.

00:23:57Kantardjieff: So my time at Fullerton was, again, another period I--every institution I've been at has been one that's in a transition, and it's in a growth. So I think if--people say you thrive just outside your comfort zone, and you thrive in managing change and evolving and focusing change, and that's what happened at Fullerton. So I replaced the founding member of the department. So that in itself is a shock to the system because now the founding department member's gone and here's this new person. And I didn't look anything like John Bryden. I'm this young woman, just like I was this woman chemistry teacher at Daniel Murphy, which was an all-boys Catholic high school. They had instructors rotate in and out that didn't last a semester. And then I walked in, in a suit and spectator--high heels and whatnot. They're like, now--it was like Monty Python, And now for something completely different. So I came to Fullerton, and as I said, they hired me because of my interdisciplinary background, which the institution wasn't ready for. Now it's very interdisciplinary, but because I was interdisciplinary, I often felt a lot of friction because I wasn't--they couldn't put me in a box. And the other thing was that all the department chairs that I had when I was faculty would view me as the utility player because they could assign me to teach just about anything if they needed me to do it, which I took great pride in. I think the only thing I didn't teach at Fullerton was an organic lab? I taught analytical, I taught computation. I taught P (physical) chem, I taught gen chem, I taught prep chem.

00:25:39Fabbi: I've heard students--

00:25:39Kantardjieff: I taught inorganic.

00:25:40Fabbi: I've heard students just love organic chemistry (laughter).

00:25:45Kantardjieff: So it was a time where I really felt I could blossom because I was tapping my passions and talents. Also, when I got there--this was 1989-90--CSUPRB (California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology), which is now CSU BIOTECH. They had just started in 1988, and they were looking for people like me. And at the time, the late Glen Nagel was my department chair, and I don't know if Steve Dahms is still alive, but Steve Dahms, who was at San Diego State, was head of CSUPRB. (Dahms died in 2024.) He was one of the founders of CSUPERB. And they met with me and had lunch and said, We want a core facility here at Fullerton, and we want a core facility in X-ray diffraction, and we want you to build it. So I had the backing of the CSU. Not everybody knew this (laughter), which caused some friction down the line. But I was able to go after a lot of funding, write a lot of grants, and I was very good at targeting funding sources where we had a high probability of getting funded. And even though they weren't the largest grants, if you get a lot of littler ones, that adds up to way more than you would if you tried to go after one big one. So we got a lot of funding from NSF (National Science Foundation), from the Dreyfus Foundation, and ultimately from Keck for the Center. And so that was that period. But also during that time, computers were really expanding. I remember the day I came back from summer, and I had a computer on my desk with email and everything. And I had gone down to the computer center to ask for an email account, which was, can you believe this was rare in 1989? He goes, you and one of the physics faculty have an email. I said, I want an email and I want all the students in my lab to have an email. They did it. And all those students went on to grad school, industry. One of them runs a lab at Eli Lilly, other--but they're all doing things based with computing. And one of them ultimately, who lives here in Carlsbad, he ended up--actually the university probably knows who he is, but I won't mention his name--but he ended up high up at PayPal and eBay and in computer security and all of this, cybersecurity. And he worked for the government for a while and whatnot. So they all got that experience because of the computing facilities we had as part of the lab because we needed to do molecular modeling and visualization. And so in those days, it was Silicon Graphics everything. And so we had this really nice Silicon Graphics lab where we were teaching classes and the students could go do research. And then I started doing--I had online office hours before anybody knew what those were (laughter) and thought it was weird. But they were like, But hey, and I said, yeah, but students appreciate it. They can have office hours with me on a Sunday evening after they put their kid to bed. You know? So the students really appreciated what I was doing for them. It was also convenient for me, too. But anyway, so I was getting really well versed in online tools, the precursors to Zoom. And I was working closely with the CIO (Chief Information Officer), and that's how I got involved with the faculty development center, where ultimately I became the faculty coordinator for academic technology. So I got to advise the CIO on what they should be looking at for the faculty. And my advice to them always was, look, nobody's going to use all of these tools, but they want something that has a common interface that they can learn how to use and then pick and choose the elements they want. Make it less daunting for them. So we ultimately picked the product for--that I don't even know if it exists anymore. It was called iLinc, but it does--it did all the things that Zoom does. You could divide people in groups and whatnot. And so when we ran into--and I would tutor faculty, train faculty on how to teach with these tools. And I would deliberately do it, like, I had a research trip. I had to go to the Beamlines in Chicago at Argonne National Lab. I'm in the--they have the equivalent of like dorms where people stay when they're working at the Beamlines. I'm in the dorm, I said at the appointed time, we're gonna' have an online class. So I had like fifteen people online with me. I'm dividing 'em in groups. They're doing all kinds of things. They're like, wow, this is easy. I'm like, yes, it is. You know? So then they would--I helped a faculty member teach a class of 120. I helped somebody else teach a class of 10. And then we ran into a space crunch in the department, and I was teaching the computational chemistry courses. And we only had one lab with forty stations, and we only used 36 because we needed spares. And the department chair said, But we have a whole backlog of people who need this class to graduate. I said, Okay, enroll 'em. He says, Well, how do we do this? I said, Gimme the lab at seven-thirty in the morning so we can use it and it doesn't conflict with any of the other biochemistry classes. And I said, But enroll 80 people. He goes, what are you gonna' do? I said, look, I have to get 'em all in there the first day. So let the fire marshal--you know, whoever needs to know--I need them all the first two sessions. They said, Okay, we can use the room next--we'll use another room next door. Anyway, I got 'em all in there, and I said, Okay, for the first two days, you need to learn how to use this interface, and then I'm gonna'--then half, then you can take it from anywhere. We're gonna meet in here at this time, and some of you can come in and meet in here, but the rest of you can be anywhere you want. And I would track them by IP address and everything else. And so that's how it works. So I taught this class. We absorbed everybody who needed it to graduate, but at any given time, I never had more than about 25 people physically there. The rest of them were remote, and I could track 'em. They knew I could track 'em. And I had a student who was way ahead of everybody on the learning curve with this technology. And he was getting really bored, and I thought, you know what? I'm gonna' enlist him to be my teaching assistant. So I said, I want you to help me with this. He said, Really? And I said, Yeah, here's your station. You make sure you monitor the groups, jump in and out and I'll--worked great. Best class I ever taught. So I did a lot with technology. But--which will segue to the next segment, after faculty what did I do? All of those experiences made me realize that I was enabling people to do things, and I enjoyed doing that. As much if not more than doing the things myself. And I realized that to be one of those enablers, I was gonna' have to step out of the faculty ranks. I couldn't do it while I was faculty. And I had colleagues in the CSU who were urging me to apply for dean positions that were opening up. And I said, But, although I've been a director of a core facility and I've run a multi-million dollar budget, I've never been a department chair. And indeed, that was the thing that kept getting me eliminated. You haven't been a department chair. So I knew I had to be a department chair. And there were several of us who had been hired within a few years of each other, who were now all coming of age to department chairs. Any one of us could have done it, but I thought it would be more prudent, more practical, more of an advantage if I became a department chair on another campus to show that I could learn how to do that elsewhere. And the dean at (Cal Poly) Pomona at the time, who was Don Straney, wanted to recruit me to be chair, and the faculty wanted me to come and be chair because they were having a lot of issues, again, growing pains, people retiring, you know, this sort of thing. And so that's how I made the move to the next step where I became department chair--of chemistry at Pomona.

00:33:51Fabbi: Okay. To Pomona. And how long were you at Pomona?

00:33:54Kantardjieff: Two years.

00:33:55Fabbi: Two years, Okay. Then after that, did you come to CSU San Marcos?

00:34:00Kantardjieff: Yeah.

00:34:00Fabbi: Okay. So let me know--tell me about your administrative path leading you to your hire at CSU San Marcos. So you kind of said here's where I was, and I was here for two years, but what happened?

00:34:11Kantardjieff: So I went to Pomona--I was at Pomona, and it's odd because Pomona was on quarters. Fullerton was on semesters. The first quarter was kind of an overlap with the two. So I was sort of transitioning out of Fullerton and transitioning to Pomona, but I was working with the Dean 'cause Pomona's graduate program in chemistry was struggling. And so I helped resurrect it before I got--right when I got there. So like, oh, she saved the program. And I was doing some mathematical calculations about intake and outflow of students and all this, and how many students, how many classes we needed. They were kind of messed up there because they were letting people teach when they wanted instead of when the students needed the classes.

00:34:52Fabbi: Like we were here--

00:34:53Kantardjieff: --it was crazy. It was worse, trust me. And the catalog didn't reflect any of it. The catalog said these courses are offered in the winter quarter and the spring quarter. Where are these classes? And this was the period 2009-11. So this was the economic tank, and we were furloughed periodically. Four days a week in the summer kind of thing. And so it--the budget was horrible. I had to manage a budget where basically I had no lecturer budget for one quarter. How was I gonna' do that? The lecturers--and of course, you have to follow all the union rules, but the lecturers all came to me and they said, We are willing to, we're gonna' put it in writing, but we're all willing to take a cut in our hours because we want this lecturer to have enough units for insurance 'cause his wife has cancer. I mean, they really cared. The lecturers there were fantastic. They were such an amazing group of faculty, and they worked so hard. They worked really hard. So Pomona was a hard time because of the budget. And I was constantly managing expectations because people just weren't used to not having the funds. I mean, they had consistently over enrolled and--I mean under enrolled and gone over budget. And so we had to straighten that out, and I learned to work with the unions really well at Pomona. I also--but then I was on a search committee at Pomona in the fall--was it in the winter or the spring? Spring of 2010 or fall of 2010. I can't remember now--for the Dean of Engineering. And at the time, I think it was Storbeck/Pimentel that was running the search. And Sharon Tenabe was leading it. And she pulled me aside after the first meeting when we all met, the search committee. She goes, why aren't you a dean? And I said because I'm earning my stripes. I have to be a chair. She goes, I'm gonna' keep you in mind. So sure enough, she called me in January of 2011 and said at Cal State San Marcos, they've restructured Academic Affairs. They've created a College of Science and Mathematics, and they're looking for a founding dean. And she says, I think you'd be perfect for the job. I'm like--that was like a dream because how often--that's a once in a lifetime opportunity where you get tapped to basically take a new college from scratch and build it and work with people to build it. And so I said, Okay. And I didn't really see myself at Pomona much longer. It was, I just--being chair is like being a mini provost in a way. It was bizarre. Anyway, it was a hard job, and I was really ready to be a dean. And if I wasn't gonna' be a dean, then I was just gonna' retreat back to the faculty and I was gonna' work with my grants 'cause I had a bunch of funding. I had some collaborations on remote instruments with USC. Anyway, I interviewed, and I got the job. And what's interesting is my other half is not always impressed by campus environments in the United States, but a week before the on-campus interview, I said, Let's take a drive down to San Marcos to take a look. And we drove through campus, we walked around and looked at the area and he's like, You gotta get this job. This is a fantastic place. And so I worked hard to get the job. And that's how I ended up as Dean at San Marcos.

00:38:38Fabbi: And what was CSU San Marcos like when you first arrived? You talked about the splitting of the college and the new structure.

00:38:47Kantardjieff: The College of Arts and Science--which at one point had become 85% of the FTE (full time enrollment) and the budget--was split. And there was a smaller piece, the larger piece. And a little bit of it was peeled off and merged with the College of Education, I believe. But anyway, we ended up College of Science and Math (CSM) with--now I gotta go back and figure out all the departments that were there. I think it's five, five or six departments. Let's see. We have biology, chemistry, biochemistry, math, physics. Am I missing somebody? I'm missing somebody.

00:39:20Fabbi: Well, the--

00:39:20Kantardjieff: --computer science.

00:39:21Fabbi: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

00:39:22Kantardjieff: Okay. And ultimately engineering. So we had this college, and I had a lot of experience from two other campuses on how things run or how they don't run. Because Fullerton was a well-oiled machine. Pomona, not so much. Their heart was in the right place, but they often made exceptions to things that kind of created some problems. So we could start--I had to learn what structures existed because some of these structures that existed here, which were related to governance and had a history--they didn't exist on other campuses. And people were saying, You gotta get rid of these things. I said, No, they mean something here. You can't just change an entire campus culture. And believe me, nobody at San Marcos wants to be Cal State Fullerton. And some of them were afraid that that's what I was gonna' turn it into. I said, I don't wanna' turn you into Cal State Fullerton. That's a cautionary tale (laughter). Not that Fullerton doesn't have great things, but one size doesn't fit all. And the faculty were already very skittish. I mean, they wanted the college, but there was a lot of apprehension because this was a big shift. And they were being split from their colleagues, who were in the other half. Now, the other half--which Adam Shapiro was hired to be Dean at that time--largely went on as it did because it was still big. All the structures that had previously existed worked for a college that size. They wouldn't work for CSM. And so I sat--I actually scheduled a retreat with the governance, with the chairs--was it the chairs or the governance committee? The chairs, yeah, the chairs--before I officially started. And we cranked out our mission statement and our core values, and that's how we started the college. That's what we based it on. And then initially I had to learn--the governance committee was very leery of the dean for historical reasons, not all of which I still understand, but they were kind of keeping me in an arm's length. And I realized I was trying to collaborate with them. But to them, that was invading their space. And so I just had to take a step back. So we kind of had a rough period for the first few months. And then we got a big donation in the spring, which I wanted to use to help fund now the awards that they have, which are fantastic. But that kind of went counter. The faculty really wanted to develop their own awards not just have something canned. And so what we did with that money is we--I said, Well, here's what we could do. I said, You know, we kind of hit this rocky period, but let's start fresh. Let's have a conversation. Everybody says we wish we'd done this sooner. I said, So do I. We didn't, but now we are. And I said, what can we do with this? I said, I've noticed there's a hundred students doing research every summer. How are they supported? Does anybody know they're doing research? Well, not really. I said, Okay. So that's how what became Summer Scholars started. We funded--we started funding students doing research that first summer. And it just grew from there 'cause ViaSat chipped in, and now I'm sure there's other industry sponsors and grants that fund it. But that's how Summer Scholars got started. And we kind of got the jitters out of our system for that first year because people got to know me. What complicated things is that summer before I started as Dean, I was still very active at the National Academy (of Sciences). I was chair of the US National Committee for Crystallography. And every three years, the International Union of Crystallography has a conference, a meeting in general assembly. And it was in Madrid. And so I talked to the provost and I said, Maybe I shouldn't go. She says, No, no, you need to go because you have our name on your badge. You need to go. So I went to Madrid. The associate dean, who was Graham Oberem was kind of overseeing things while I was gone, and we were on the phone all the time. There were some hiccups with things. So I missed convocation. So nobody saw me the first day of the semester, which is bad. So then I got back, and we were going to have our college convocation on a Friday, and that was the great San Diego blackout, where everything went dark. So nobody saw me then either. And of course, the semester started. And although I went around to the departments, really the only time everybody saw me in a group setting was when we had our holiday party. So I got off to a start where people didn't really know who I was. It was that lack of familiarity that was causing problems and not knowing what I was going to do or what I was like. And also nobody had been fully informed of the arrangements that had been made when I came here to bring the center and other things. Which subsequently I said, Look, I realize now you all didn't know all this, so let's talk about it. So when the second year started, we came out of the gate like a racehorse, and we never looked back. And I got very emotional at that first commencement.

00:44:46Fabbi: Yeah.

00:44:48Kantardjieff: I started talking and my voice was really deep. And the development officer assigned to us at the time, it was Kelly Briggs goes, It's okay. It was endearing. We know you were emotional, but anytime--even whether it's dean or provost to stand at the podium at a commencement still gets me to this day.

00:45:09Fabbi: So about ten years you were dean at CSUSM.

00:45:12Kantardjieff: Nine.

00:45:13Fabbi: Nine years. So--

00:45:16Kantardjieff: I stayed longer than most do because I had started something that I wanted to finish on my resume.

00:45:21Fabbi: Let's talk about that. Let's talk about those highlights and that, that big thing.

00:45:26Kantardjieff: When I got here, what was really nice is the--I mentioned Kelly Briggs. Kelly was very seasoned as a development officer 'cause she worked at Jacobs School of Engineering at University of California, San Diego). So she started taking me on the tour around the county to meet people. You gotta meet the new dean of the new college, all this stuff. And I think I can summarize the sentiment by paraphrasing the late Duane Roth, who was the CEO of CONNECT. I--we met with him in his office in UTC (University Town Center). And we sat down and he says, Thank God you're here. When are you gonna' have an engineering program? I mean, this is what he said. And of course, I had talked to Karen (Haynes) and to Emily (Cutrer)--President Haynes. And I said--she said, I never said we weren't gonna' have an engineering program. She said, When I got here, I said, not yet, Because she knew that the campus wasn't ready for that. But she laid the groundwork because I reread her convocation address from 2010. So the campus was 20 years old then. And she talked about how the restructuring was intended to lay the groundwork for the future of the campus. And I knew she knew that you had to have a separate college of science and math to have an engineering program. 'Cause I think--I don't know--the founding faculty may know this, but I have heard rumors that the original plans of the campus had a college of engineering--science and engineering. But the founding faculty felt the region wasn't ready for it yet. And they preferred letters and science, which I can understand. But anyway, so now we have this. So it's 2011, 2012. I know by this point, the faculty are really leery about engineering, especially the physics faculty. They're afraid of what's gonna' happen to their program 'cause they had this beautiful applied physics program with the electronics option, and--which looks a lot like electrical engineering. I knew they were very apprehensive. And, of course, we were going through budget problems then because we had a deficit in academic affairs we had to close. And it would take a few years to do that. We eventually did in a way that was probably the best way to do it. But it meant taking more students in which this faculty were a little upset about. But we closed the gap. So now we fast forward to 2014. And in 2014, we were in the silent phase of the comprehensive campaign, and it was gonna' go public. So I sat down with then Provost Oberem--which is another interesting professional relationship, which I highly commend him for because he was the associate dean when I was the dean. And then he became my boss. So that was interesting. But anyway, we talked, and I said, Now's the time to strike. I said, We need to do this. We need to follow the lead that Bakersfield did--get grants to launch this program. We have to engage the faculty, and we've gotta engage the industry to know which programs are most needed. And the best way to--and all eyes are gonna' be on the campus now--this comprehensive campaign, our 25th birthday, everybody's looking at us. Now's the time. He goes, Okay. So that's how we started. I started making the rounds of all the departments, talking to them on a regular basis, finding out what they liked about it, what concerned them about it. And I was constantly framing my conversation in the structure of Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. You know, here's the why. I mean, I know everybody wanted a building, which we now have, but you don't do this to get a building. Why are you doing this? Because the community needs the talent, and there's not enough of it in the region. They're looking to us to support them. And then the how--how we're gonna' do it. And then the what--the value added we get. We get accredited programs, and we get building. So I went around several times. We engaged a grant writing firm to help us write the grants to the Department of Education. We had faculty who were actively engaged in that. We had a meeting where we brought in the industry to give us their input. So I really--it was a community effort. Everybody had a stake in this. And then the piece that I'm deeply humbled by was that we needed a faculty member to head the grant and with sufficient academic credentials that they could do it. And the one person in physics that we felt could do it was Gerardo Dominguez. And he was very apprehensive because he had a research program--he still does--with lots of students. But I said, But Gerardo, this is what the program needs. It needs the street creds and you have them. And I said, You'll have a lot of support because you've got the dean's office and the associate dean. And he agreed to do it. He was very apprehensive. He goes, Let me think about it. And then he called me on a Sunday night and he said, I'll do it because it's a legacy. So anyway, that's how that whole--that all rolled out. And then the faculty were still having hiccups about budget and enrollment and kept writing memos to me and the provost, and we would sit down and patiently iron it all out. The one department that was resistant at the end--oh, we thought humanities would be resistant because, and they, We don't care, that generates GE (general education FTE), we're fine. You know? Okay. 'Cause I was worried what was gonna' happen in Senate, you know? And so the one department that was still concerned was biology. They were concerned about budget 'cause they have a big program. And I said, You have no concerns. I said, This is not gonna' take enrollment away from you in any way. And the enrollments of this program are supported with other funds. You're not gonna' lose anything. So we finally convinced them. And then when the vote went through in the Senate, it was unanimous. And I practically cried in the Academic Senate (laughter) when it happened. So--

00:51:34Fabbi: --I remember that day.

00:51:35Kantardjieff: And it's something I really appreciate about this campus is how engaged the faculty are in curriculum. Because this approval process we have for curriculum doesn't exist on all of other campuses. It exists at Fullerton, but it doesn't exist at Monterey Bay. It's just, they just do things differently. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I just really like this approach because everybody has a stake in what's happening. And that means that it has a great--I think it has a greater chance of success. And it does.

00:52:11Fabbi: So any other highs and lows while you were dean here at CSUSM or--'cause you talked about some highs and lows already--but any other ones? But also just your impressions, other impressions of the campus just given that time from 2010-2020.

00:52:30Kantardjieff: Well, I can honestly say--and this is not a slight to Fullerton or Pomona or Monterey Bay--but this was the best academic gig I ever had, hands down. The people, the place--it had its problems. At times we had challenges. What institution doesn't have challenges? But everything--to use the cliches, the planets were aligned laughter). The vibes were right. It was just a good experience. I wasn't here during the pandemic, but I--looking from the outside, I think that that's solid foundation--sorry, my voice is getting deep 'cause I'm crying. That solid foundation is what helped San Marcos keep going.

00:53:22Fabbi: So let's take a deep breath. And you left San Marcos just very shortly after March 2020.

00:53:31Kantardjieff: Yeah.

00:53:32Fabbi: So Let's talk a little bit about--

00:53:35Kantardjieff: So career trajectory at that point was, I was thinking for the last few years--once engineering was started or approved--that I wanted to be a university president. And everybody said, You've got the skill sets you need to do it. Mentors would say, You're a scientist and you're logical, but you have soft skills. So okay. But--and even though professionally they say, Oh yeah, you can jump from dean to president because the dean job is closer to being like a president on a grander scale. But the reality was you can't. Unless it's a small private institution, the rules still were you've gotta jump, you've gotta go through all the hoops. And that meant provost. And so I started looking at provost jobs. This was about 20--I think I started in 2018. And now I also need to interject some personal stuff here. So my mother had had a massive stroke in 2016, which made me kind of also step back from doing anything professionally 'cause I didn't know what was gonna' happen. And she was in skilled nursing. Jose Mendoza was in my office when I got the phone call about that. And I just had the chair meeting, and I said, Sorry, gotta go. So anyway, she was in skilled nursing, but I realized after those two years or so that she kind of reached a point where there was not gonna' be any more upward trajectory. It was a daily--it's sad to say this and I don't mean to be cold--but every day I was just waiting for a phone call. My brother was living with my father at the time. And so I knew my father had somebody to take care of him and drive him to see my mother 'cause my father's health was starting to decline also. He was having mini strokes. And I could also see some cognitive decline, which worried me because that ultimately leads to things that happened later. So I started experimenting with provost jobs, and I was very competitive. I believe that in 2018--it was 2018 or '19, that timeframe--I'd applied to one of the Cal State campuses just as a test. And I'd also applied out of state. I thought, oh, it'll be an adventure to live outside of California. And I was a finalist. So this must have been '18, '19. But I'd also been nominated for a presidency somewhere--a couple of places actually. And now I thought, well, also one of the Cal State campuses--this was the period when there was all of this ruckus about and people were upset about the changes in the GE (general education) requirement and the units, and faculty were not happy, there were protests. And so because institutions didn't want candidates visiting during things like that, they suspended searches. So there was a delay in this search where I was a finalist, and then I was nominated for these presidencies, which I really wanted. So I told the search firm, I said, Look, I'm gonna' gamble, but I can't be in a provost search and a president search because people are gonna' look at this and think, what are you doing? So I backed out of that search, and I did not get interviewed for the presidential searches. And I think it was also because I hadn't been a provost. I hadn't been at the VP level. That was it. But I was a finalist for this other provost position out of state. And I was gearing up to interview for that. It was in a more rural part of the country, and getting around was kind of cumbersome. You'd have to fly here, fly there, rent a car, do this, whatever. And as I was arranging my trip--'cause this campus had three branch campuses and they wanted me to visit all of them in this trip--my father had also had an incident where he'd fallen. He was okay, but the doctor said, But he's fallen more than once 'cause we see evidence of it in the scans. And I'm like, oh geez. And I realized I couldn't--if I needed to get back for an emergency, I couldn't get back fast enough. And so I decided I had--I just said, For personal reasons, I have to back out of the search. They were very disappointed, but okay. But then I started applying. I had like a dozen, and I interviewed for--I was a finalist in nine, I think. So now we roll to the pandemic. So I mentioned--at the end of the year, in '19--at the end of the year, Bernhard and I always had a holiday party for the academic affairs team. And we got together and I knew what I was up to, and I was sitting there and I couldn't tell any of you, but I was looking at all of you thinking, well, this is the last time we're all gonna' be together. So now January comes, and we start hearing about Covid, and it's getting worse. I'm interviewing at places, and I remember my last interview was on March 9th. So I flew back. This is already--Covid is going--I flew back on the 10th. Now I get--and I have an offer letter from one of the institutions I interviewed already that I have to have signed by March 21st or March 20th, whatever, 20th? Yeah. Anyway, and then two other places I'd applied had put their searches on hold. So I thought. well then this is the one. This was high on my list. This was Monterey Bay. So I signed my offer letter on Saturday, and we went dark on Tuesday. And President Ochoa at Monterey Bay wanted me to start working with him ahead of time to help with Monterey Bay shutting everything down. But at the same time, I have to shut down the college here. Right. And the worst part was that I had to tell everybody I was leaving on Zoom. I couldn't do it at our regular college assembly because we couldn't meet face to face. That hurt me so much. And Zoom--it's worse because you could see everybody on the screen. And when I said, I'm leaving, the shock on everybody's face just really got--so anyway, I had to tell them on Zoom. And so then I'm helping all--we're on Teams--I'm helping the chairs get everything they need to do labs remotely, all this. I'm immersed in that. And then one day, a week I'm meeting with Eduardo (Ochoa) on Zoom about Monterey Bay. And then--very astute thing he recommended--he said, I know we're all working remotely, but he said, it would really be good if you were up here. He said--I think because faculty and staff largely live on campus--he said, For them to see you means they know you're part of the team. And he was right. So I relocated. We had a search process in the college for the next, for the interim dean. And Jackie was appointed. She had the experience and the spirit to do it. And then I took the last two weeks--I took some vacation in June because I couldn't take all my vacation with me (laughter). I could cash out some of--I cashed out some of it, took some.

01:01:10Kantardjieff: So I moved up to Monterey on July 4th, 2020. And we're all in the throes of the pandemic at this point. But driving into campus, to east campus housing, people are out in the yard, they're waving. It was right. We had a sense of community. And I ended up renting a house next to the president, which helped 'cause we could meet in the backyard and talk shop. So that was my first month at Monterey and trying to keep the faculty center going and the training going and summer school online, working with the vice president of student affairs to make sure we had laptops for everybody in the fall. So all of this is going--six weeks in, so it's the middle of August--August 16th. That's the day that all the wildfires broke out, and I got a phone call at 11:45 that my mother passed away. But apparently they were supposed to call me and my brother first. They called my father, and my father didn't know what was going on and said call me. So they call me. So now the adrenaline kicks in again. And I have to get on the phone to take care of all of that logistics. And my brother and I ultimately arranged for a funeral--pandemic funeral--online. You know, how do you, how do you prepare for things like that? You're doing things on Zoom around the house. Anyway, we had a funeral for my mom. We were able to do it with ten people, six feet apart with masks. And so the semester was starting then, and we had convocation the next day, too. The fires are burning. And we had convocation. Two members of my academic affairs leadership team had lost their homes. The president wants to know if we can even have classes. So I'm calling around. Faculty are all in place. They're in hotels, where they had to be evacuated. Students have laptops. Three days in a student emails me, says, Dr. K, the fire came through our house. I'm okay. My family's okay, but my laptop's covered in fire retardant, can you get me another one? And he sends me this picture, and I swear everything's pink, and I called the VP for student affairs. I said, Get this kid a laptop. So things went smoothly for that first few weeks and then in October (2024)--but we had budget problems. And I'll be frank, I was really starting to question whether I'd made the right decision to go up there or not. There were just some things that were--I had some different perspectives on things. But anyway, I cared about the students a lot. They were wonderful students up there. And I felt an affinity for the area because when my father came to the United States after World War II, he was granted asylum and recruited by the Army and Military Intelligence because of his language skills. And he was based in Fort Ord and taught at the Defense Language Institute. So every day I drove through campus, I thought of my dad. There was a whole closeness to my dad. He was still alive at the time. Anyway, October comes, and I don't want to get into the details, but things happen that you don't wish on your worst enemy. And to cut to the chase, the Vice President for Student Affairs had to go on a leave of absence. The AVPs (Associate Vice Provosts) that reported to me are both texting me at 6:30 in the morning 'cause they're seeing this thing in the newspaper. And they're like, What do you think the President's gonna' do? And I said, What do you think he's gonna' do? So Monterey Bay is a small campus compared to San Marcos. So you can only do this on a small campus; otherwise you would be in a funny farm. Eduardo called me and he said, I need to appoint an interim VP for Student Affairs. What do you think I should do? And I said, Well, you've got an AVP (Associate Vice President) for Student Affairs. But he didn't feel comfortable doing that for some reason. I don't know why. I had worked with the AVP and found them to be very competent. But anyway, he says, Well, I'm gonna' appoint you (laughter). And I said, Why? I said, Well, I can do it, but why? He goes, well, because it'll help you learn the campus much faster because now you'll be in the other division. But he said, I'm gonna' give Housing to the CFO (Chief Financial Officer). So you won't have Housing, but you're gonna' have the student--you're gonna' have--so basically, I went from having twelve direct reports to twenty-four. And I did that for five months. It was a good experience. I learned so much. I was, A, I discovered some budget problems with the new student union we had to rectify, so I worked with the CFO to do that. I realized that we needed to realign some things in the divisions for more--to be more effective. And so I proposed some restructuring, which we had nearly completed when I left. Because the new President put everything on hold, which is not unexpected. Then we hired an interim VP. I got the campus to use The Registry (firm focused on placing senior interim leaders in higher education) a lot because we had to appoint--I felt badly for the colleges 'cause we had a lot of interim deans. It was like a revolving door for a couple of years 'cause two deans had gone on to be provost, we had interims, and then we had searches, and then we had more interims. And it was quite complicated. So I was doing a lot of managing people, expectations, emotions, managing change. It helps--I'm an empath, an empathic person. So being an empath is a two-edged sword. I could see the world through their eyes and anticipate what was going to bother them or upset them and do what it took to help ease people's minds. But on the other hand, I'd also know when I had to make hard decisions, and I knew people were gonna' be upset about and that I don't like to upset people. But anyway, so that was that whole first year. And, of course, then we were getting--we were running vaccines on campus through the parking lots and everything else. And then drive up, get a vaccine. And then I said, We really need to do something for commencement. So following the lead of San Marcos, we did a car-mencement (drive-through commencement) in the big lot--AT&T lot that we have at Monterey Bay. And it was--some of the administrators didn't like it, but the students and the parents just got such a kick out--and the faculty were all lined up in the parking--everybody just really enjoyed it. And then the following year we did the make-up commencements and stuff. But by this point--and I had calculated that I would be a provost for maybe two years before I moved on and did something, either become a president or retire because I had a lot of time on the clock in the CSU. Eduardo had decided that he was gonna' retire. He just felt it was time. He'd been President ten years. He and his wife loved to travel, and they just wanted to do other things. And then-Chancellor Joe Castro wanted him to announce early, 'cause several campuses were doing presidential searches, and they wanted them all hired like by mid-spring, which, when you think about it, is a daunting task. Especially when nobody is told what's happening, which is worrisome. So he announced. That upset the whole campus because the campus was just now opening up and getting together. So when people are meeting face-to-face, it becomes gripe sessions 'cause they're just upset about everything. And I'm trying to calm people's minds. And then we had the make-up commencements and Eduardo was seriously contemplating just stepping down and handing it to me. And I'm like, no, don't do that. You need to stick it out until July. And there's a presidential search going on at Monterey Bay, too. And I felt that I would better serve the campus as its provost not its president and onboard--be there to support as an experienced provost. But whenever there's a transition at that level, there's a fifty-fifty chance that the leadership team is rotated out. So I didn't expect that I would stay, I didn't expect that I'd go. I just--every day was a--and we had recruitments starting and whatnot. Commencement comes, and Eduardo had Covid. So I got to fulfill my dream as an administrator in that I presided over commencement, and I conferred degrees. It was funny because I was reading the script and I'm--as Provost, I present you, and as President, I confer--no, it was kind of fun. But again, standing there at the podium was just this emotional experience that I can't describe. It was just great to do that. So I had done everything there is to do really.

01:10:00Kantardjieff: So new President came, I'm trying to help her with the campus. But being Provost was--oh, so then I forgot to mention one thing. My father passed away in the middle of all of this in 2021 before Eduardo retired. And so I had to deal with that. It was not unexpected, but the decline was really fast. We had learned in the last year-and-a-half of his life that he had leukemia. And it was an untreatable form, so the blood transfusions just couldn't come fast enough at the end. We didn't tell him. He was kind of senile. And a couple of times he'd asked my brother, Am I dying? And my brother would say, Not today. But anyway, my father passed. Three months before he passed, I realized he still hadn't gotten all his estate affair planning in order. And I really started pushing. And I managed in June, on a Sunday, to get all the paperwork filed. His will, the trusts, all of this stuff. And my father went in the hospital the following Thursday and never came out. He had pneumonia, he'd aspirated something, he got pneumonia. So two weeks later, we get a notice that there's something wrong with the paperwork, and of course, my father's not in any condition to sign anything anymore. Apparently he'd signed two forms where his signature was below a line instead of above a line, and the courts accepted one but not the other. And I'm telling this 'cause anybody who's watching this, I know more about estate planning than you ever want to know and the mistakes that can happen. But to cut to the chase, he had a trust with nothing in it because the quit claim deed for the house didn't get filed. So what do you do? So he passed away. We had the funeral, and we were able to have a normal funeral with people, although people still felt uncomfortable gathering in large groups, so we didn't have a luncheon after that. And then everything went into probate. So in December of twenty-one, January of twenty-two, everything went into probate except what he had designated as accounts for--beneficiaries for accounts and things. So most of it. And including the house went into probate. And I was still up in Monterey. All the turmoil of the presidential change is happening. My brother, who I love dearly, was overwhelmed and just couldn't keep on top of things with the probate. And when we got a letter from the court that as executors, we were gonna' be removed if we didn't take care of something, I said, You've gotta take care of this. So he goes, well, the attorney said everything was fine. And, you know, when did you last talk to the attorney? Oh, like three months ago. So it turns out the attorney who was handling the case had some health issues and had forgotten to file a status report. And we didn't know. So I realized I'm too far away now to handle this. I used to come down during the pandemic about every two months to check on things. And then when things opened up, I would schedule those trips when I went to the Chancellor's office for the provost meeting so I was not gone from campus too much. But this was really getting hard. The stress was really started--between professional stress of a provost and the personal stress, it was really starting to pile up. I mean, I have to be on call 24/7, and anytime a notification went off on my phone, it was like I'd shoot ten feet in the air. It was like PTSD. So at Christmas in December of twenty-two, I really started to look at the time I'd spent and what was happening and you know, family matters, and I thought, no. I think it's time that I just retire. And I decided that I was gonna' retire no later than the end of the calendar year, twenty-three. But as the year started, I thought, you know what? I have--this is a do as I say, not as I do for anybody in the CSU. I'd accrued 1062 hours of unused sick time. Sick leave. That was six months of sick leave I never used. So that added to my service credits. I probably should have taken some of that sick leave. So I decided I'm gonna' retire in June of twenty-three. So at the end of June in twenty-three, I retired. And again, I had to do it on Zoom, not because we couldn't meet face-to-face, but because we were doing on-campus interviews of candidates and the Provost's conference room was booked. All the conference rooms in the building were booked. So I had to call a last-minute meeting with my staff on Zoom, and I had to tell them I was leaving on Zoom. And it was just déjà vu. It brought back all the pain from here (CSUSM). And yet, I could hear them outside my office 'cause they're outside my office, and I can hear them mumbling and grumbling, and my assistants start crying, and it was really hard. So anyway, I retired at the end of June twenty-three and moved back. I told myself I'd give myself three-to-six months to kind of adjust. I'm also helping my brother clear out our parents' house because we have to sell it to pay the bills--the legal fees and stuff. So that was hard. But it was a walk down memory lane going through things. My parents' garage was like a museum, literally. So we cleaned out the house. We sold it in October. My brother is living with me at the moment until probate ends because then he can get on with his life hopefully. And I can get him back on his feet. 'Cause I'm indebted to him. He took care of my parents for probably ten years 'cause they were in decline. They just didn't--nobody realized it, but they were really declining. So six months went by, got a handle on the probate, realized what I needed to do to de-stress, if you will. Took up my passions again. I love to cook, as I said. So cooking, I have--we bought our house because of the kitchen. So I cook. When we cleaned out the house, I didn't take furniture except a dining set that I'd helped my mother buy years ago, and I reupholstered the chairs. So I did some reupholstery. We also had an heirloom in the house that was a child's rocking chair that my grandfather had made 'cause he was a carpenter. I reupholstered the chair, and I gave it to my godson's son for his first birthday. And my grandfather's his great-great grandfather. So he has the rocking chair. So I'm into furniture upholstery. And then I've recently started making jewelry.

01:16:29Fabbi: Nice. Beaded jewelry--

01:16:30Kantardjieff: --So I'm doing--beaded, wire, all kinds of stuff. So yeah, I'm tapping the artistic side that I had put aside.

01:16:40Fabbi: Did you have--through all this time--did you have hobbies?

01:16:44Kantardjieff: Well, I used to sew.

01:16:45Fabbi: Okay.

01:16:46Kantardjieff: Photography was a hobby for many years when we needed the big fancy digital cameras. I still have my Cannon camera in the cupboard, but you know, what we've got on our cell phones is pretty good. And photography was something that my brother and I shared with my dad 'cause he was really into photography. And we're so grateful to him 'cause he took pictures of everything growing up. We have boxes of slides, videos, movies. Twenty years ago when we had a reunion of our youth group, my brother and I made a commemorative DVD with all this stuff. That same youth group just met in September--fifty-five years since our first Halloween party as a church youth group--and we watch those things again. So, yeah, photography. Bernard and I like to hike, although he likes to do the more rugged extreme things, whereas I like calm and easygoing stuff. Let's see. Oh, gardening. I inherited a green thumb from my grandmother. And Bernard likes to garden and watch things grow. So we made a little garden bed in our yard, and this summer I decided to go all out so I grew a lot of tomatoes and pepper. I told people when I retired, What are you gonna' do? I'm gonna watch the tomatoes grow. That's what I did this summer. I watched toma--I had all these different varieties of tomatoes and peppers grow, herbs. So I still have my garden. Indoors, I have aero gardens--hydroponic aero gardens. So I grow a lot of herbs in the house. Or I start them, and then I take them outside. And then the most recent thing I've been doing, and I've gotten--Janet Powell started on me that as a matter of fact--is I grow mushrooms. From kits, of course. Yeah. But I grow mushrooms. Lion's mane, oyster. Yeah.

01:18:40Fabbi: So you've talked a lot about your accomplishments in your career. Do you have one or two things that you feel have been most impactful? You talked about the lab at Fullerton.

01:18:57Kantardjieff: There's two things, and I would say from the faculty years, it was the core facility at Fullerton. And from the administrative years it's growing, doubling the size of the college while I was Dean and getting the engineering programs launched.

01:19:09Fabbi: Okay.

01:19:11Kantardjieff: And meeting the faculty I recruited at the groundbreaking of the building. It's like, man, I'm proud of you people. Yeah.

01:19:18Fabbi: Can you tell me about people who most influenced your work and your life? You talked some about that too, but that--

01:19:25Kantardjieff: Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, it's funny, I have a career talk I've given where I have a, that's called A Chemist's Journey. And it's like on an energy curve. And there's one slide where I just have this collage of photos of people that have influenced me in my life. So I can rattle through that. I mentioned I wanted to be an astronaut. So John Glenn is on that slide. I wanted to be an oceanographer. Jacques Cousteau is on that slide. I love to cook. Julia Child is on that slide. George Bernard Shaw is on that slide because of the quote I've often used (adapted by Robert F. Kennedy), Some men see things as they are, and (ask) why. I dream things that never were and (ask), why not? That's my mantra. Who else is on that slide? But those are more celebrity types and things. Oh, Frank Shorter's on that slide. 'cause I was a runner for many years. I still run but on a treadmill. I don't do half marathons anymore. But I was a runner for many years. And I got started in running when I was at Daniel Murphy because faculty at Daniel Murphy were all asked to support two student groups as faculty. So I was the junior class advisor because I taught the juniors chemistry. So I got to do things like organize prom and stuff and Disneyland night. But I also had to support athletics. And so I supported the track team because who goes to watch the track meets? So that's how I got into running. So supporting the track meets. But professionally, I had a faculty member at Fullerton who was also a physical chemist, John Olmstead, who I still keep in touch with. He was also department chair for a while. He chaired the search committee that hired me. But he was a good colleague who gave me a lot of professional advice about how to navigate the system. He knew it well. One of the women on the faculty, Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, who ultimately moved over to UC (University of California) Riverside, or no, UC Irvine. She was a really stellar atmospheric chemist. But she was able to give me a lot of professional advice as a woman in the field about how to navigate the rules and if people just blow you off, this is what you do kind of thing. So she was a good--gave me good advice about my personnel file and how you make work order requests and get things done through the system. So I think at Fullerton those were a couple of people that gave me a lot of advice. And then at Pomona, of course, Don Straney was and still as a mentor of mine. He recruited me as a dean. He went on to be the chancellor at Hawaii Hilo. But he really knew the ins and outs of administration. He--what I really appreciated in him was we knew changes had to be made, and he had my back as a department chair. Whether you're a chair or dean, you need to know somebody has your back. And I was fortunate that he had my back. At San Marcos, I'd say the people that have given me really good advice have been President (Karen) Haynes. She was a mentor. And when things were a little rocky, she goes, I can't figure this out. We gotta figure out what's wrong 'cause you're doing all the right things. And it turns out it was this information gap. That people didn't know something, and I didn't know they didn't know something. And then you mentioned Graham. Graham gave me a lot of good advice when he was the Associate Dean 'cause he'd been here for a long time, and he really knew the ins and outs of the institution. But when he became Provost--because he was a familiar face to take on that role, and I understand that. He and I had a professional relationship that we needed to navigate because roles had kind of been reversed. And so we went and had lunch at Mr. Taco and just said How--and we did. We just sorted out how we were gonna' deal with things. And he was a really good mentor, and I knew I could talk to him And when we disagreed, we could disagree. And I could tell him why, and he'd tell me why, and we'd reach compromises and sort out things. So for a while with engineering, he wanted to move really fast. And I have all--people said, No, we need to stay this slow because the faculty need to be in it and they need to get--they need to dot all their I's and cross all their T's. It'll get done. And it did. So I would say also he was a good mentor, but Karen really was a good mentor, too. Still is a good mentor.

01:24:11Fabbi: So from people who have influenced you to yourself as a mentor--do you wanna' talk a little bit about--.

01:24:18Kantardjieff: --outside of academia or--

01:24:20Fabbi: The way that you have mentored others in your career.

01:24:25Kantardjieff: Oh, that's a good question.

01:24:33Fabbi: And it could be intentional or unintentional.

01:24:36Kantardjieff: I can't--I don't think I can identify any one person as much as I identify with methods or approaches to mentoring that I have observed to be effective, which are, when you wanna' mentor somebody, you don't want it to come off like you're trying to fix them. That there's something wrong with them. It's not that there's something wrong with them, it's just that the way they've approached something isn't a match to what they need to do. Or if you sense that somebody has some lack of confidence, figure out why that is. And there's ways of overcoming that. It takes practice. I mean, in my case--and I read a lot, so I look at things online a lot of the time to see what approaches might work. And I do the LinkedIn training classes and stuff. But as an empath, one of the hardest things I have to deal with is not confrontation, but crucial conversations. Because I know if I'm--I can sense when somebody's gonna' get upset. It's hard for me to upset somebody. It's hard for me to make those tough decisions. So I usually--I have to take a day or two to prepare for things like that so that I'm in the right frame of mind to sit down with someone and say, Okay, look--here. So that's my strength and my weakness. So it's more approaches than anything else. You know, the Simon Sinek circles (The Golden Circle) was an approach I took. I do a lot of those leadership-type classes, so it's not necessarily I seek out one person, although when I'm confronted with something that is like, Okay, this is a fork in the road, which one do I take? Or what do you think about something I have--I don't wanna' mention them in a video, but I have a series of people that I will contact about certain things and just say, Okay, I need to bounce some ideas off of you, or give it to me straight. You have to have that. And you have to have different people, not one person. And when you get to the VP level or higher in administration, you've got to have a close-knit group of people that you know you can talk to each other because you have less, fewer people to talk to when you get to that level. When I was Provost, who do you talk to? You can't just go talk to faculty necessarily because it could be a conflict of interest. Anybody at the cabinet level would have that issue. So what was interesting in Monterey is sometimes--'cause we all lived in east campus--we'd go home and say, Okay, meet me at the corner at 5:30, and we'd go hike up into the Fort Ord Monument before it got dark. And we'd just talk out problems or challenges or what's bothering you or what do you think about this or that. So there were ways of doing that. And you know, if there were people in the cabinet who had some years ahead of me, I would seek advice from them. I didn't have to take it, but I'd say, What do you think about this? or What's your experience with this? I would talk to Eduardo sometimes about stuff.

01:27:51Fabbi: Okay. Well, we're nearing the end. Is there anything else you'd like to share in this interview that I haven't asked you about or that hasn't come up?

01:28:09Kantardjieff: Well I'll mention--I don't know why I wanted to mention this, but it's just a point of pride and again, it kind of defines who I am. I mentioned at the beginning of the interview the culture I grew up in and that I danced in a dance group. I still have costumes in my garage, which--and my cousin has now given me his battery of costumes. So now we're like, what do we do with all these things 'cause none of us dances professionally or semi-professionally anymore. But I mentioned that we performed at the Opening Ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics. So the story of that day--'cause that defines who I am, and I'll tell you why. We are all in--there were twelve of us in this dance group, and we had two changes of costumes for different regional dances. And so our director said, Okay, go find a buddy your size. So we have twenty-four people. So everybody found a buddy, and we were twenty-four people, and we had to go to rehearsals. So I was at UCLA at the time in grad school. So twice a week for a month before the Olympics, we'd have to go downtown to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, grab a bus, they would take us to the Coliseum. They would literally just put boxes of green apples and Snickers bars in front of us. That was dinner. And then we had to learn the song we were supposed to perform at this event. We also got to do the dress rehearsal. So I knew what was happening for this opening ceremony before anybody else. And I invited--they said, You can invite some friends. So I invited all my lab mates from UCLA. They're like, wow. Anyway, the day of the event, we had to be there early and queue up. Now I had been to the Coliseum many times for football games 'cause I'm a graduate of USC and UCLA, but I'd never entered the Colosseum through the tunnel--the floor of the Coliseum. So they staged us all in the swim stadium, and it was 105 degrees that day. And Bulgarian costumes, if you've ever seen them, are wool. They're heavy knit wool. So the guys are sitting there in their wool pants with their socks off, put feet in the pool of the swim stadium. We're--got all socks off, we're trying to stay cool. Anyway, they line us up. There's two thousand people from Los Angeles in ethnic costume demonstrating the melting pot of Los Angeles, which I just loved the diversity of Los Angeles. And then all of a sudden, they have us part like the Red Sea, and Rafer Johnson comes running through with the torch. Or somebody came through running with the torch, was it Rafer Johnson? I can't remember now. But somebody came through with the torch and we're like, wow. And then they let us out on the field, and it was to Beethoven's Ode to Joy, which is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. That and the seventh symphony. And so we go around the field--now when we rehearsed, none of the athletes were there. Now all the athletes are on the field except the former Eastern block. They all boycotted the games. 'Cause we boycotted Moscow, right? Yeah. So anyway, we walk out, we come around to our mark, we turn around, and we're right in front of the United States Olympic team. Bulgarian, American, United States Olympic team. We're trading hats, pins, pieces of our costume Our dance troupe leader's like don't give that away, don't give that away. And then beeline across the field, the team from Yugoslavia--what was Yugoslavia--sees us, and of course, the costumes are very similar. They come running over, we're taking pictures, all of this stuff. It was just, that was just a great evening. So I share that. Other than that, I will again just say that this was the best gig. I really loved it here, and I still love it here.

01:31:49Fabbi: Well, I want to thank you so much for interviewing with me today. I know you've made a big impact on my life and on this place.

01:31:56Kantardjieff: And I'm sorry that (gestures to teary eyes)--

01:31:58Fabbi: Please do not--

01:31:59Kantardjieff: You get older, this happens more. So fair warning to people.

01:32:03Fabbi: Yes. But thank you so much.

01:32:05Kantardjieff: It's my pleasure. And I look forward to coming back when that building opens.

01:32:09Fabbi: That's right.

01:32:12Kantardjieff: So one more thing about the mentoring piece. Back to the mentoring piece. When I was dean here at Cal State San Marcos, for several years, I was a member of Athena San Diego, and Athena San Diego's mission is to promote women in STEM businesses and women in STEM. And there's fundraising events we've had, and also they do awards. I believe I won an award in 2018 for promoting diversity--I think. Innovation and diversity. Anyway, or it was innovation. That was it. Diversity was somebody at Qualcomm. That's right. It was innovation. I should know this. I still have the glass piece, which disappeared for a while. I kept calling Jackie--where's my award? Because when we had the pandemic, I had to put all my stuff in storage in the basement of one of the science buildings. But back to the mentoring. As part of Athena, we had a motto which was, We lift as we climb. And I think that's my philosophy of mentoring. As I'm able to go up--remember I said I wanted to change the rules. As I have the ability and the opportunity to rise up the ranks, I will help people come behind me. And so that's kind of that pay it forward of Immaculate Heart--women of great heart, you know? We're paying it forward for the next generations of women to move up.

01:33:34Fabbi: Thank you so much.