William Harder Cole

William Harder Cole (June 23, 1892 – February 6, 1967) was an American biologist, science educator, and zoologist. Cole's research work focused on skin grafting, animal behavior, protein metabolism, and invertebrate blood. Cole completed high school at Ballston Spa High School in 1910 and completed his B.A. at Hamilton College in 1914. Cole then spent 1914 studying at University of Bonn. Between his MA and Ph.D., he served in the United States Army from 1917 to 1919, as a Sergeant first class, in the Sanitary Corps where he helped develop a typhoid vaccine. He also served as the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1930 to 1952. He also served as the council's first director from 1944 to 1959, where he helped expand research opportunities within the sciences and extended opportunities to the humanities. From 1949 to 1951, he was the chairman of the Demarest Motion Picture Committee, an organization set up to support the creation and filming of a documentary on the president of Rutgers from 1906 to 1924, William H.S. Demarest.

After retiring from Rutgers in 1959, William Cole remained quite active in the local and scientific communities. In 1962, he dedicated the Nelson Biological Labs at Rutgers. In 1966, he was involved in the preservation of two historical buildings in New Brunswick, New Jersey. From 1965 until his death in 1967, Cole collaborated on a project focused on Florida seashells with Beatrice and Milton Harris that began as a library and school display project in Naples, Florida and eventually resulted in the publication of a booklet, Some Marine Molluscs From the Central West Coast of Florida.

Research William Harder Cole's research work focused on skin grafting, animal behavior, protein metabolism, and invertebrate blood. Cole published close to one hundred articles in professional journals, magazines and newspapers. Cole made notable contributions to the understanding of the effects of external stimuli on the beating of barnacle appendages known as cirri, the effect of temperature on the adaptation of Fundulus heteroclitus to white and black backgrounds, and the composition of the body fluids (particularly blood) of invertebrates, including the lobster.