Scott has a degree in
statistics and a
PhD from the
University of Glasgow. Her thesis was on the sources of error in
radiocarbon dating, and was supervised by Murdoch Baxter and Tom Aitchison. Her research interests include model uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, modelling how pollutants disperse in the environment, radiocarbon dating and assessing
animal welfare. In 2005, Scott was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), Scotland's
national academy of science and letters. In the
2009 Queen's Birthday Honours, she was appointed an
Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to social science. Professor Scott was awarded the
Royal Statistical Society Barnett Award in 2019 for "her outstanding, pioneering research into the application of innovative statistical techniques to environmental issues." ==Selected works==