 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).Bird was born in Inverness, Scotland on 18 May 1952 to Isabella Agnes Gordon ("née" Macdonald) and Herbert Gore.She was educated at Elgin Academy in Scotland, where the mathematics master, Lewis Grant, introduced her to statistics.