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.
Aged 18, she began working as a chemist at the Krasnaya Nity textile factory, Kharkiv, Ukraine.
[1] 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 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.
In June 1955, the laboratory was officially transferred to a new nuclear research and development centre, NII-1011 (VNIITF) in Chelyabinsk-70 (a city now known as Snezhinsk).
In the early 1960s, her research was initially purely on explosives but then wholly given over to improving on the RDX-based charge used as a stage nuclear weapons, and this was achieved using HMX (or octogen) with a significant increase in the energy release, first tested with a small nuclear charge on 21 October 1968.