Dame Sheila Bird FRSE
Honorary Professor, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh
Professor Sheila M. Bird DBE MA PhD FRSE FMedSci DSc (Hon. Edin)
Sheila Bird is Programme Leader Emerita at the Medical Research Council’s Biostatistics Unit and Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University’s College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Sheila was made a Dame in the King’s Birthday Honours 2026 for services to Statistics.
Sheila, whose work has spanned five decades of epidemics, was a member of the Statistics Expert Group for the Infected Blood Inquiry and co-directed its modelling work on which she and Sir David Spiegelhalter were cross-examined.
With Dr. A. Graham Bird, her working as biostatistician behind bars began via high volunteer-rate Willing Anonymous Salivary HIV (WASH) surveillance studies in Scottish prisons, later testing also for Hepatitis C Virus (WASH-C). Using record-linkage, her research team quantified the very high risk of drugs-related death in the first fortnight after prison-release.
Sheila refers to opioid-related deaths (ORDs) as “the forgotten epidemic”: she designed Scotland’s before/after evaluation of Scotland’s National Naloxone Programme which, within 3 [5] years, had reduced by 30% [50%] the proportion of ORDs with a 4-week antecedent of prison-release.
Sheila has received four different medals from the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). One was for having introduced the RSS’s Awards for Statistical Excellence in Journalism and statistical seminar for journalists.
