Katharine Way was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Addisson Way, a lawyer, and his wife Louise Jones.

Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and her father married an ear and throat specialist, who provided Kay with a role model of a career woman.

[2] Way was educated at Miss Hartridge's boarding school in Plainfield, New Jersey, and Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[2] From 1929 to 1934 she studied at Columbia University, where Edward Kasner stoked an interest in mathematics, and co-authored Way's first published academic paper.

[4] She next went to the University of North Carolina, where John Wheeler stimulated an interest in nuclear physics, and she became his first PhD student.

[5] In 1938, she became a Huff Research Fellow at Bryn Mawr College, which allowed her to receive her PhD for her thesis on nuclear physics, "Photoelectric Cross Section of the Deuteron".

[11] With Dexter Masters, 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.

[12] The book included essays by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, and sold over 100,000 copies.

She also persuaded the editors of Nuclear Physics to add keywords to the subject headings of articles to facilitate cross-referencing.