Paul F. Kerr

On October 9, 1941, shortly before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop the atomic bomb.

The key raw material for the project was uranium, which was used as fuel for the reactors, as feed that was transformed into plutonium, and, in its enriched form, in the atomic bomb itself.

[3] A professor at Columbia University, Kerr was seconded to work on the Manhattan Project, tasked with locating and procuring supplies of uranium.

As part of this assignment, he traveled to Katanga Province in the Belgian Congo, he also visited and assessed the Canadian Eldorado deposit on Great Bear Lake, and the vanadium mines of the Colorado Plateau.

[5] In 1949, Kerr and Johannes F. Vaes were the first to describe Sengierite, a radioactive mineral discovered at the Luiswishi Mine about 20 km north of Lubumbashi in Katanga Province.