Born on 13 December 1888 in Odessa, Catherine Chamié was the daughter of the Franco-Syrian notary Antoine Chamié, and his Russian wife Helene Golovkine. After completing her school education in Odessa in 1907, she enrolled at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Geneva in the same year, where she received a doctorate degree in electrical physics in 1913. She later returned to Russia and continued her study on voltages in gas discharge tubes at the physics laboratory of the University of Petrograd. During the First World War, she worked as a war nurse in the clinics set up at the University of Odessa until 1916. After the war, she continued her scientific work as a mathematics assistant at the University of Odessa.
