David Scott is the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University in Houston. He was a founding member of the Department of Statistics in 1987, and chairman from 1990-1993. He was editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics from 2000-2004. From 2000-2005, he served as a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. As part of that activity, he organized a meeting on real-time data mining, held in December, 2002. He is also a member of the John Wiley Editorial Board on Probability and Statistics. He is past Editor of Computational Statistics, and past Associate Editor of the AOS, JASA, and Statistical Sciences.

He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also an elected member of the International Statistics Institute. He was named the Texas Statistician of the Year in 1993 and received the U.S. Army Wilks Award in 2004.

His research interests include multivariate data analysis, nonparametric function estimation, clustering, data mining, robust estimation, outlier detection, and statistical computing. He is author of the 1992 Wiley book ``Multivariate Density Estimation: Theory, Practice, and Visualization'' as well as numerous scientific papers.