Frank Albert Cotton (Philadelphia April 9, 1930 - February 20, 2007). American chemist. He was president of the W.T. Doherty- Welch and chemistry professor at the University of Texas A & M. He was recognized in the field of transition metal chemistry and published more than 1,700 scientific articles.

He trained at Drexel University and later at Temple University, where he graduated in 1951. After a doctorate at Harvard, Cotton began teaching at MIT. In 1961 he became the youngest person to receive a fixed teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the age of thirty-one. His work was very marked by the electronic structure and chemical synthesis. He was a pioneer in the study of multiple links between transition metal atoms. He began his work in this field with rhenium halides. In 1964 he identified a four-way bond in the ionic species Re2Cl82-. His work soon extended to the study of other species, among which is the chromium (III) acetate, from which he elucidated its structure.
Cotton was one of the first to propose X-ray diffraction of monocrystals as a tool for the study of coordination chemistry. Cotton coined the term "hapticity" and established the nomenclature derived from it.

Among the acknowledgments received by Cotton include the National Medal of Science in 1982, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the Priestley Medal, the highest recognition of the American Chemical Society, in 1998. In 1995, the chemistry department of the University of Texas A & M, together with the local section of the American Chemical Society, created the "FA Medal Cotton »for excellence in the field of chemical research. A second prize named in his honor, the "F. Albert Cotton Award" for Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry, is awarded at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society that is held each year.

Cotton was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and a corresponding member of the academies of different countries including Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Denmark. He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society and received twenty-nine honorary doctorates.