"This was a place where the slogan was, "high school is the best years of your life," she says. "And I went through those four years thinking, 'I hope not'. People used to say, 'look at her, she talks like Shakespeare.'"
Escaping the confines of Cleveland suburbia, Prentiss went on to Wellesley, where she triple majored in physics, mathematics and philosophy, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1980 after three years.
"I picked physics because I thought it was the most intellectually macho subject," she says.
At Wellesley, Prentiss says she cultivated a taste for existentialist philosophy and for Wittgenstein. In the meantime, she started working in the labs at MIT as an undergraduate through an exchange program at Wellesley. She continued at MIT for graduate school. There, she carried out the first project to observe channeling in optical standing waves--channeling the path of atoms along the nodes of laser standing waves. Prentiss received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1986.
After receiving her Ph.D, Prentiss was hired to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Steve Chu, who won the Nobel Prize this year. At Bell Laboratories, she directed the first demonstration of how shining laser light from all directions can confine atoms to the center of a magnetic field, the first Magneto Optical Trap.
"I actually worked on some of the experiments for which he [Steve Chu] later won the Nobel Prize," she said. "Then, when he left, I became the leader of the atomic physics lab."
Prentiss arrived at Harvard in 1991. In 1995, she became the second woman in the physics department to ever receive tenure. Professor of Physics Melissa Franklin was the first female tenured by the department.
Prentiss says that females in the science should not be stereotyped.
"I can name some women in science, but it's not clear what they have in common," she says.
Prentiss says it is difficult to be a member of an underrepresented group in science,
"You get invited to speak at one event or another, and get asked to join lots of committees because they want a woman scientist," she says. "However, people do tend to interact differently based on knowledge and experience."
Prentiss has similarly neutral things to say about her sexual orientation.
"Am I out? Does everyone in my lab know? Yes. Do I discuss it with my chairman? No," she says. "I know very few gay women in science...recently, I met one young gay woman at a conference recently, and that was incredible. Her university doesn't have domestic partner benefits, so she actually made the university raise her salary so that her partner could be covered. I thought that was a really gutsy move."
As a teacher, Prentiss has won numerous prizes. She says that undergraduates are very important to her, and that she especially makes the effort to guide undergraduate research.
"I try to teach someone that to be a researcher is like practicing a craft, how to figure out what to do next...it's not just in physics that this is practicable, also includes electronic debugging, for instance. The key is where to look," she says.
Prentiss currently has eight undergraduate students conducting research under her supervision, the largest number for a professor in the entire physics department.
"I try to arrange it so that hopefully each will have one publishable paper by the end of a semester or summer," she says.
Of the students who work for her now, she receives nothing but praise.
Noah C. Helman '98 says that Prentiss encourages her students to take an active role in teaching themselves.
"In a large university where many professors are difficult to reach, I find her outwardly encouraging me to pick her brain about any topic that interests me," he says. "Working for Professor Prentiss has convinced me that I want to be an atomic physicist... I could not speak more highly of a person for her ability as a scientist, as a teacher and as a leader."