Dame Vera Stephanie "Steve" Shirley CH, DBE, , FREng, DFBCS (previously Brook, née Buchthal; born 16 September 1933) is an information technology pioneer, businesswoman and philanthropist (naturalised British in 1951).

In July 1939 Shirley arrived, at the age of five together with her nine-year-old sister Renate, in Britain as a Kindertransport child refugee, and recognized how lucky she was to have been saved.

[7] In the 1950s, Shirley worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, building computers from scratch and writing code in machine language.

[1][14] She served as an independent non-executive director for Tandem Computers Inc., The Atomic Energy Authority (later AEA Technology) and the John Lewis Partnership.

In 2003, Shirley received the Beacon Fellowship Prize for her contribution to autism research and for her pioneering work in harnessing information technology for the public good.

[30] In 2018, she was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum,[31] and became the first woman to win the Gold Medal of the Chartered Management Institute 'for her stellar contribution to British engineering and technology'.

Its mission was facilitation and support of pioneering projects with strategic impact in the field of autism spectrum disorders with particular emphasis on medical research.

[36] From May 2009 until May 2010, Shirley served as the UK's Ambassador for Philanthropy, a government appointment aimed at giving philanthropists a "voice".

[37][38] In 2012, Shirley donated the entirety of her art collection, including works by Elisabeth Frink, Maggi Hambling, Thomas Heatherwick, Josef Herman and John Piper to Prior's Court School and the charity Paintings in Hospitals.

[39] In 2013, appearing on BBC Radio 2's Good Morning Sunday with Clare Balding, Shirley discussed why she had given away more than £67 million of her personal wealth to different projects.