In 1998, The Priestley Medal was awarded to F. Albert Cotton by the American Chemical Society “to recognize distinguished services to chemistry.”

Cotton spent the majority of his career at Texas A&M University, College Station, having earned his doctorate from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

His body of work on metallic elements has impacted not only inorganic chemistry but also biochemistry, molecular biology, chemical engineering and physics.