Modus Operandi: in five decades of epidemics and as Biostatistician Behind Bars.

Session Lead:

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.

By linking prison records directly to national mortality registries and pioneering anonymous saliva testing behind bars, biostatistician Dame Sheila Bird uncovered two alarming public health realities: infectious diseases like Hepatitis C and HIV were spreading rapidly inside prisons, and former inmates were up to 29 times more likely to die of a drug overdose in their first month after their release. Her groundbreaking research and subsequent pilot studies proved that prisons are critical public health hubs, ultimately inspiring Scotland's world-first National Naloxone Programme and establishing global protocols that equip released prisoners with life-saving overdose treatment.

Biography
Dr. Bird, 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 a 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.

Dr. Bird 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.

Dr. Bird 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.

Brandon DL Marshall, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology
Brown University

Biography
Dr. Marshall is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. He is also founding director of the People, Place & Health Collective at Brown University. He received a PhD in epidemiology from the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. In 2011, he completed postdoctoral training at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Dr. Marshall focuses on substance use epidemiology, with a specific emphasis on harm reduction research and overdose prevention. His team evaluates programs and policies that aim to improve the health and well-being of people who use drugs. He has published more than 400 scientific publications and three book chapters. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2019 Early Career Public Health Research Award from the Association of Schools & Programs of Public Health.

He has served on numerous task forces to address the nation’s overdose crisis. Dr. Marshall also serves as chair of the Rhode Island Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee and is an expert advisor to the state’s Overdose Prevention & Intervention Task Force.

Beth Ann Griffin
Senior statistician at RAND
Co-director of the NIDA-funded RAND/USC Opioid Policy Tools and Information Center (OPTIC)

Biography
Beth Ann Griffin’s statistical research has focused on methods for estimating causal effects using observational data. Her public health research has primarily fallen into three areas: (1) the effects of gun and opioid state policies on outcomes, (2) substance use and mental health, and (3) the impact of nongenetic factors on Huntington's disease.

Griffin co-directed the RAND Center for Causal Inference between 2013 and 2018. She has served as the principal investigator on four grants sponsored by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), the latest two devoted to developing new tools and methods to understand causal mediation and moderation and assess the sensitivity of effect estimates to omitted variables (www.rand.org/statistics/twang), and well-operationalized, empirically-supported sequences of decision rules—known as “Adaptive Interventions” (AIs)—to provide guidance about substance-use services decisions for adolescent clients.

Griffin's research has appeared in leading journals such as Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Statistics in Medicine, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Causal Inference, and American Journal of Public Health. Griffin also serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Applied Statistics. She received her Ph.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.