Ekaterina Feoktistova

Ekaterina Alekseevna Feoktistova (also Alekseyevna) (Russian:Екатерина Алексеевна Феоктистова, 18 March 1915 – 5 January 1987) was a Ukrainian Soviet chemist, engineer, physicist and explosives expert. She worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project from 1947 until her retirement, leading a laboratory from 1952.

Life and career Aged 18, she began working as a chemist at the Krasnaya Nity textile factory, Kharkiv, Ukraine. She studied at Kharkov State University in 1934, and in 1935 at the Kiev Industrial Institute. In 1937, she was transferred to a special department at the Leningrad Chemical and Technological Institute. She graduated with a red diploma as an engineer-technologist. She enrolled in graduate school but remained at the institute as a research assistant. During these years, she flew planes and made parachute jumps.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Feoktistov was evacuated to Sverdlovsk, where she worked as a process engineer at the Scientific Mining Society in the Urals. In 1942, she worked at Factory 46 of the Ministry of Armaments as a senior engineer. The following year, she was transferred to the Ministry's cartridge design bureau in Kuntsevo, Moscow Oblast. She returned to the Leningrad Institute in 1945 as a research officer, then senior research officer while continuing to study in graduate school. Between 1946-1947 she was a freelance instructor of the Frunzensky District Committee of the communist party. She gained her Ph.D. in 1947. In December that year, she was sent to work at the secret nuclear research facility KB-11 ('Design Bureau-11', which was also known as Arzamas-16 and colloquially the 'Installation', now the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF)).

At KB-11, she worked in laboratory No.2 under the directorship of leading explosives researcher Alexandr Belyaev. Her research was using TNT/RDX, used in the first Soviet nuclear bombs. She won the first of her state prizes in 1950 for this work. In 1951 and 1952, she led a group experimenting with pulsed magnetic fields and currents produced by explosives, following up on the ideas of leading nuclear bomb designer Andrei Sakharov.