Susannah Scott

Susannah L. Scott is a Canadian-American chemist who is Professor of Surface Chemistry and the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Sustainable Catalysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research considers the design of heterogeneous catalysts for the efficient conversion of feedstocks and catalysts that improve the environment. She serves as an Executive Editor of ACS Catalysis and is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early life and education Scott earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Alberta. She moved to Iowa State University for her doctoral work, where she studied oxygen activation and oxidation mechanisms catalysed by transition metals. She worked under the supervision of James (Jim) Espenson and Andreja Bakac. The design of heterogenous catalysts is limited because of the lack of information about the identities of the active sites. To overcome these shortcomings, Scott has created model catalysts with precisely controlled local structures. She has created models of the active sites for the polymerisation of olefin and metathesis.

Scott makes use of advanced spectroscopic methods to evaluate reaction mechanisms. In particular she makes use of infrared and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. In 2014, she founded the Mellichamp Academic Initiative in Sustainable Manufacturing and Product Design (SMDP), which studies the extraction and manufacture of fuels and other materials. She is interested in renewable feedstocks and environmentally-degradable materials. She has developed low temperature catalysists that can upcycle polyethylene, allowing the conversion of used plastics into high-value materials. She was named the Duncan & Suzanne Mellichamp Academic Initiative Professor in 2014.

In 2020, Scott was elected chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara Academic Senate. That year she was appointed chair of the Gordon Research Conferences on Catalysis, which is due to be held in New Hampshire in 2022.

Awards and honours 2000 YWCA Women of Distinction Award 2009 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2017 University of Pennsylvania Grace Hopper Distinguished Lecturer 2018 University of Amsterdam John van Geuns Lecturer 2019 Colorado State University Boulder Scientific Lecturer 2020 University of California, Berkeley Eastman Visiting Lecturer

Selected publications