During his fifteenth year, Prescott served as a "rod man" on a surveying crew to lay out the state line between eastern New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

In 1888, he enrolled at the Sanborn Seminary in Kingston, New Hampshire, becoming a member of the first graduating class in 1890 which consisted of three girls and two boys.

degree in chemistry in 1894 after he wrote his senior research thesis entitled "Salt as Nutrients for Bacteria".

With the help of Sedgwick, chair of the Biology department at MIT, Prescott found his first position as an assistant chemist and biologist at the sewage treatment facility in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he worked for the rest of 1894 and part of 1895.

During that time, William Lyman Underwood of the William Underwood Company, a food company founded in 1822 in Boston, Massachusetts, approached Sedgwick about product losses in his canned food product with swells and exploded cans despite the newest retort technology available.

Prescott and Underwood's work was first published in late 1896 with follow-up papers done from 1897 to 1926[4][5] This research, though important to the growth of food technology, was never patented.

When MIT underwent a reorganization following President Samuel Wesley Stratton's death in 1931, the new president Karl Taylor Compton selected Prescott as the first dean of MIT's School of Science the following year, a role Prescott would serve until his retirement in 1942; in the meantime, he would continue his role as head of the Biology and Public Health Departments, including continuing his food technology research.

[12] Even while he was busy as department head and dean, Prescott continued working on research beneficial to the growth of food technology from 1921 to 1942.

Literature such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in 1906 about slaughterhouse operations would be a factor in the establishment of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) later that year.

Prescott was chosen as the first president because of his previous positions as presidents of two other professional organizations: the Society of American Bacteriologists in 1919 and the American Public Health Association in 1927–1928[18] Following his 1942 retirement, Prescott remained a busy man even becoming acting dean during 1944 when the current dean George Russell Harrison, a physicist, was called on assignment to Australia.

[19] He also assisted during World War II in a ration survey per the United States Army, monitoring its history from 1789 to 1912 in three different time periods as part of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, and even worked as a special consultant to the quartermaster corps regarding food.

[21] He also remained active in IFT, both on the national level and in the Northeast Section (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) until his death in 1962.

[25] The Institute of Food Technologists established the Samuel Cate Prescott Award in 1964 to honor young researchers in food science and technology for those who are under 36 years of age or who are a maximum ten years after earning their highest degree whichever is later.

[26] Three MIT faculty have held this professorship since its inception: Samuel A. Goldblith, Gerald N. Wogan, and since 1996, Steven R.