History of the Oliver Bird Fund

Captain Oliver Bird, a member of the prominent Midlands food family, suffered from Osteoarthritis.

In 1948, he made a bequest to the Nuffield Foundation to be devoted to the promotion of research into the prevention and cure of rheumatism in the UK. For over fifty years, the Oliver Bird Fund has been applied to clinical trials, project grants, fellowships and small grants to researchers in the field.

In 2003, Trustees launched a major new initiative, the Oliver Bird Rheumatism Programme, to enhance future research capacity by training a cohort of over fifty outstanding young research scientists through doctoral training programmes at selected UK institutions.

The Fund’s income of £6 million has been committed to the Programme for ten years until 2012.

A recent mid-term evaluation, including international peer review, found that the Programme was establishing an innovative method of rheumatic disease research training, with a considerable impact on rheumatology in the UK. 

By emphasising a scientific training within a clinical context, the students’ PhD projects also aim to promote the translation of research findings. Reviewers judged the Centres to be encompassing diverse work of an internationally competitive standard, their Coordinators were providing outstanding leadership and that excellent students had been attracted to the ethos, supervisors and facilities offered by the Centres.