Katharine Way (1902-1995) was a leading female scientist/nuclear physicist involved in the Manhattan project.  She constructed the empirical Way-Wigner formula for beta decay rates of fission products. Katharine is also known for her compilation of nuclear data and establishing the Nuclear Data Project in Oak Ridge, TN. She is the 20^th installment of our “Women in Nuclear History” series. Some notable details about her life include:

1. Katharine (Kay) was born on Dec 9, 1902 in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. She was a middle child of William A. Way, a lawyer, and Louise Jones.
2. Her mother died when she was just twelve years old. Her father remarried with a woman who was an ear and throat specialist (ENT). Her stepmother became Kay’s career woman role model.
3. In 1920 Katharine entered Vassar College, a private liberal art college for women, but was forced to drop out after two years after becoming ill,  with suspected tuberculosis. After recovering from this illness, she continued studies at Columbia University and graduated with Bachelor of Science in 1932. She co-authored her first academic paper in mathematics with Edward Kasner, her adviser.
4. She did her graduate studies at the University of North Carolina under John Wheeler, a famous theoretical physicist. She was his first PhD student, and wrote the thesis: “Photoelectric Cross Section of the Deuteron”. She was on the verge of discovering nuclear fission, since she questioned stability of highly deformed nuclei due to high angular velocity in 1938 year. This was a year before nuclear fission was experimentally and formally explained by Hahn,  Strasmann, and Meitner in Germany.
5. Katharine started working on the Manhattan project with Alvin Weinberg at the Metallurgical Laboratory (the “Met Lab”) in Chicago in 1942. They were examining neutron flux data from Enrico Fermi’s models to use in designing Chicago Pile-1, the first man-made critical nuclear reactor, mainly in the aspect of fission decay heat. She was also involved in solving nuclear reactors poisoning (strong neutron absorbers are called “poisons” and can affect the criticality of a reactor) with Eugene Wigner (Nobel award winner). She co-developed the Way-Wigner approximation for fission products decay.
6. After the war she moved to Los Alamos Laboratory and initiated work on collection and organization of nuclear data. Eventually this was expanded into the Nuclear Data Project (NDP) and the Nuclear Data Sheets, Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables.
7. In 1945 Way signed the Szilard Petition to spread awareness of the moral dilemma surrounding atomic weaponry. She was an advocate for peace and social justice. She criticized investigations against her fellow scientists during the wave of McCarthyism.
8. She co-edited the 1946 New York Times bestseller “One World or None: a Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb”, which included essays by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Arthur Compton and Robert Oppenheimer.
9. In 1968 she became an adjunct professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. When she retired she became an advocate at her retirement community.
10. Katharine Way died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on December 9, 1995 at the age of 93.

Sources:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Way
2. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-women-who-changed-history-nuclear-science
3. https://rinconeducativo.org/en/anniversaries/december-9-1995-death-katharine-way-contribution-nuclear-physics-construction-cp1-reactor/
4. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-physicist-who-spoke-out-against-the-bomb-she-helped-create/

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