Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (b.1937) was the President of Latvia for eight years, from 1999-2007. She was the first woman in Eastern Europe to become a head of state and consistently enjoyed high popularity ratings in her country. She also gained wide respect in the international community. 

In 2005, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga was appointed as Special Envoy to the Secretary General on United Nations reform. Later that same year, she was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. She was an official candidate for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006 and remains active in the international arena. Over the course of her career, she has received numerous state and private awards. 

Vairas Vīķe-Freiberga’s began her professional career as an academic, rather than a politician. Following a traumatic, early childhood in war-torn Latvia and as a refugee in post-war Germany, she obtained a high school education in French Morocco. She moved to Canada at the age of 16, where she spent the next four decades of her life. While pursuing a successful academic career and teaching psychology at the University of Montreal, she was also an active member of the émigré Latvian community and studied Latvian folklore. 

After the renewal of Latvia’s independence, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga returned to her homeland to head the Latvian Institute, which was created to promote Latvia’s image abroad. As President of her country, she energetically defended Latvia’s interests in the international arena. Thanks in large part to the efforts of President Vīķe-Freiberga, Latvia succeeded in becoming a member state of the NATO alliance and the European Union in 2004.