Heidi Safia Mirza was born in Britain to a Trinidadian father and an Austrian mother, and at the age of four she moved with her parents to Trinidad.
'"[8] In 1977, she went to do Development Studies the University of East Anglia, where in her first year she met and married her husband;[8] she was pregnant with their daughter when she sat her final exams.
[2] She co-authored the OfSTED school government inspection report Educational Inequality: Mapping Race, Class, and Gender.
[11] In 2015, in recognition of her achievements, she gave the 50th Anniversary Martin Luther King Lecture with Doreen Lawrence in St Paul's Cathedral.
[12][13][4] In 2020, Mirza featured in the Phenomenal Women exhibition at London's Southbank Centre celebrating the 35 Black professors at UK universities.