Sheila Bird is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge. She has championed the use of statistical method in public policies ranging from transplantation through epidemics to prisoners’ health. Record-linkage designs underpin her work to quantify, and reduce, the high risk of overdose death soon after prison-release. |Work on the misuse of statistics, and her BMJ series “Statistics in Question”, transformed the quality of articles in medical journals and she established the Royal Statistical Society’s awards for statistical excellence in journalism.|Professor Bird’s research-team was first to quantify, validate and meta-analyse prisoners’ very high risk of overdose death soon after release; and to design Europe’s largest prison-based trial for risk-reduction.