Katharine Way, PhD, was a physicist who made significant contributions to the Manhattan Project. Katharine Way earned her PhD in nuclear physics from University of North Carolina in 1938. In 1942 she joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago and became a part of the Manhattan Project. With physicist Eugene Wigner, she developed the Way-Wigner approximation for fission product decay. After World War II, she became a leader in organizing and standardizing nuclear information worldwide, establishing the Nuclear Data Project (NDP). The NDP led to the launch of the academic journals Nuclear Data Sheets and Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables, both of which still exist today. In 1968 Way left the NDP and became an adjunct professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Way passed away in 1995.
