James F. Scott was born in New Jersey, USA in a village of 3000. His parents did not attend high school. He was educated at Harvard (B. A., physics 1963) and Ohio State University (Ph.D., physics 1966).  After six years in the Quantum Electronics Research Department at Bell Labs he was appointed professor of physics at Univ. Colorado (Boulder), where he also served as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research.  He was Dean of Science and Professor of Physics for eight years in Australia (UNSW, Sydney, and RMIT, Melbourne) and has been Professor of Ferroics at Cambridge University since 1999.  At present he is Research Director, Cavendish Laboratories, department of Physics.  His paper "Ferroelectric Memories" in Science (1989) is probably the most cited paper in electronic ceramics with 3400+ citations, and his text of the same title has been translated into Japanese and Chinese.  He was elected a Fellow of the APS in 1974, and in 1997 won a Humboldt Prize and appointment as the SONY Corp. Chair of Science (Yokohama).  He was awarded a Monkasho Prize in 2001 and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and recipient of the MRS Medal (Materials Research Society), followed in 2009 by the Jozef Stefan Gold Medal of Slovenia and in 2011 by election to the Slovenian Academy of Sciences. He first came to China in 1980 to negotiate the very successful CUSPEA program to bring the first physics Ph.D. students from China to the USA.