[3] 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.

[5] Record linkage studies in Scotland were central to Bird's work (with others) on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection and on the morbidity and mortality of opioid addiction.

Her team first quantified the very high risk of drugs-related death in the fortnight after prison-release, in response to which Bird and Hutchinson proposed a prison-based randomized controlled trial of naloxone, the opioid antagonist, for prisoners-on-release who had a history of heroin injection.

She is the first female statistician to have been awarded four medals by the Royal Statistical Society (Guy bronze, 1989; Austin Bradford Hill, 2000; Chambers, 2010, Howard, 2015).

Back in Cambridge, Bird worked with paediatrician Dr Colin Morley on the British Randomised Evaluation of ALEC Therapy (BREATHE), the first RCT to demonstrate a one-third reduced mortality in premature babies by administration at birth of artificial surfactant.

[15] Work on transplantation statistics in the 1980s with Gilks and Bradley led to beneficial matching being adopted as the basis of UK's exchange of cadaveric donor kidneys.

To estimate the potential for cadaveric solid organ donation from brainstem-dead donors, Bird designed UK's first confidential audit of all deaths in intensive care units which revealed that relatives’ refusal –rate (then 30%, since risen to 40%), not doctors’ failure to ask, was the fundamental problem.

A series of record-linkage studies in Scotland on the late sequelae of Hepatitis C virus infection (with Hutchinson and Goldberg) and on the high risk of drugs-related death soon after prison-release (or after hospital-discharge for drug-treatment clients) followed.