# Mara Prentiss Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics ![Mara Prentiss](/sites/g/files/omnuum7031/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/prentiss/files/mprentiss1.png?itok=dZUb2ttS) location\_on Lyman Lab 222 17 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 smartphone [(617) 495-2910]() email laptop\_windows [Department of Physics profile](https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/prentiss) Mara Prentiss has been a professor at Harvard since 1991. Her early research involved using electro-magnetic fields to cool and manipulate atoms. She is a co-author on publications with four Nobel Prize winners: Steven Chu, Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Bill Phillips, and led to her selection as a Fellow of the American Physics Society. She later used optical and magnetic tweezers to probe biological systems. Early work measured the forces involved in polyvalent adhesion of uropathogenic Escherichia coli to mannose-presenting surfaces. More recent work has studied how DNA molecules respond to mechanical force, mechanisms underlying RecA mediated homologous recombination, and general features of self-assembling systems. During 2019 and 2020 she did research (article published in *[Nature](https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-00460-x/d41586-021-00460-x.pdf)* and *[medRxiv](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.21.20216895v1.full-text)*, and commended on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidrliu/status/1319772351144382465?lang=en)) that COVID-19 transmission can be airborne and superspreading events do not require superspreaders. She has taught and developed laboratory courses for undergraduates, a general education courses on the science of small things, and a freshman seminar on science and policy issues involved in the transformation to a renewable energy economy. She is also the author of the book *Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology*. At present she collaborates with Chantal Prévost’s group at the IBPC and Veronica Godoy-Carter’s group at Northeastern University. People who received a PhD from her group are professors at major research universities and researchers at national laboratories. - ## People Terms [Principal Investigator](/people-terms/principal-investigator)