Scott received her B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Alberta (Canada) in 1987, and her Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from Iowa State University in 1991, where she worked with J. Espenson and A. Bakac on the activation of O2 and organic oxidations. She was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow with Jean-Marie Basset at the Institut de recherches sur la catalyse (CNRS) in Lyon, France, before joining the faculty of the University of Ottawa (Canada) in 1994 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. She held an NSERC Women's Faculty Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, a Union Carbide Innovation Award and was named a Canada Research Chair in 2001.
She moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003, where she is currently holds joint faculty appointments in both Chemical Engineering and Chemistry & Biochemistry. She directs the NSF-sponsored Partnership for International Research and Education in Electron Chemistry and Catalysis at Interfaces, a collaborative research program involving UCSB and several prominent catalysis research groups in China, and was recently named to the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Sustainable Catalytic Processing. Her research interests include surface organometallic chemistry, olefin polymerization, nanomaterials, biomass conversion, environmental catalysis and the development of new kinetic and spectroscopic methods to probe reaction mechanisms at surfaces.