Scott Kirkpatrick (Hebrew: סקוט קירקפטריק) is a computer scientist, and professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has over 75,000 citations in the fields of information appliances design, statistical physics, and distributed computing.

He initially worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center with Daniel Gelatt and Mario Cecchi researching computer design optimization. They argued for "simulated annealing" via the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, whereas one can obtain iterative improvement to a fast cooling process by "defining appropriate temperatures and energies". Their research was published in Science and was an inflection point in heuristic algorithms.