Independent Career
Following his graduation from Harvard, Cotton began teaching at MIT. In 1961, at thirty-one years of age, he became the youngest person to have received a full professorship at MIT. His work emphasized both electronic structure and chemical synthesis. He pioneered the study of multiple bonding between transition metal atoms, starting with research on rhenium halides, and in 1964 identified the quadruple bond in the Re2Cl2−
8 ion. His work soon focused on other metal-metal bonded species, elucidating the structure of chromium(II) acetate.
He was an early proponent of single crystal X-ray diffraction as a tool for elucidating the extensive chemistry of metal complexes. Through his studies on clusters, he demonstrated that many exhibited "fluxionality", whereby ligands interchange coordination sites on spectroscopically observable time-scales. He coined the term "hapticity" and the nomenclature that derives from it.
In 1962 he undertook the crystal structure of the Staphylococcal nuclease enzyme, solved to 2Å resolution in 1969, published in 1971, and deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB code 1SNS) as one of the first dozen protein crystal structures.
In 1972 Cotton moved to Texas A&M University as the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry. The following year he was named the Doherty-Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. He also served as the director of the university's Laboratory for Molecular Structure and Bonding.
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