In 1986, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Washington. Scott joined the faculty of the University of California at Irvine in 1988, where he was an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Biological Chemistry. He moved to Oregon Health Sciences University in 1989 and became a faculty member of the Vollum Institute in 1990. In 1997, he was promoted to senior scientist at the Vollum Institute and was appointed as an associate investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Scott holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the School of Medicine.
Hormones mediate their effects by changing biochemical events in the cell's interior.
Protein kinases that are dependent on cAMP govern many biochemical events by phosphorylating target proteins. The changes in the activity of these newly phosphorylated proteins are what alters the cell's physiology. John Scott and his laboratory use recombinant DNA techniques, protein chemistry, and enzymology to study the actions of PKA within cells. However, individual hormones may promote PKA-mediated phosphorylation of a distinct set of proteins. This may be because different hormones activate different subtypes of the PKA enzyme.