Sheila Macdonald Bird OBE FRSE FMedSci ( née Gore ; born 18 May 1952) is a Scottish biostatistician whose assessment of misuse of statistics in the British Medical Journal ( BMJ ) and BMJ series ‘Statistics in Question’ led to statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals . Bird's doctoral work on non- proportional hazards in breast cancer found application in organ transplantation where beneficial matching was the basis for UK's allocation of cadaveric kidneys for a decade. Bird led the Medical Research Council (MRC) Biostatistical Initiative in support of AIDS/HIV studies in Scotland, as part of which Dr A. Graham Bird and she pioneered Willing Anonymous HIV Surveillance (WASH) studies in prisons. Her work with Cooper on UK dietary bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) exposure revealed that the 1940–69 birth cohort was the most exposed and implied age-dependency in susceptibility to clinical vCJD progression from dietary BSE exposure since most vCJD cases were younger