[2][3] She is additionally vice-president (International) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,[4][5] and a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council.

Her thesis was on the sources of error in radiocarbon dating, and was supervised by Murdoch Baxter and Tom Aitchison.

In 2005, Scott was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), Scotland's national academy of science and letters.

[8] 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.

[9] Professor Scott was awarded the Royal Statistical Society Barnett Award in 2019[10] for "her outstanding, pioneering research into the application of innovative statistical techniques to environmental issues."