Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga GCB OC OQ (née Vīķe; born 1 December 1937) is a Latvian politician who served as the sixth President of Latvia from 1999 to 2007.

She remains active in the international arena and continues to speak in defense of liberty, equality and social justice, and for the need of Europe to acknowledge the whole of its history.

There she received her first education in Latvian primary school at a displaced persons camp in Lübeck, Germany, where her baby sister died.

She earned her PhD in psychology from McGill University in 1965 with a dissertation supervised by Dr. Virginia Douglas, entitled Concept Learning in Normal and Hyperactive Children.

[6][7][8] From 1965 to 1998 Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga pursued a professorial career at the Department of Psychology of the French-speaking University of Montreal, where she taught psychopharmacology, psycholinguistics, scientific theories, experimental methods, language and cognitive processes.

At the same time she did scholarly research on semiotics, poetics and the structural analysis of computer-accessible texts from an oral tradition—the tradition of Latvian folksongs.

[9] During that period Dr. Vīķe-Freiberga held prominent positions in national and international scientific and scholarly organizations, as well as in a number of Canadian governmental, institutional, academic and interdisciplinary committees, where she acquired extensive administrative experience.

She was an invited speaker at numerous international events (such as the joint session of the United States Congress,[12] in June 2006), as well as an outspoken pundit on social issues, moral values, European historical dialogue, and democracy.

During her presidency she regularly visited towns and villages to meet her constituents in person, and received many thousands of letters yearly from Latvians.

In April 2005, the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan named Vīķe-Freiberga as a member of his team of global political leaders helping to promote his comprehensive reform agenda.

During the Spring semester 2008 she was an invited Senior Fellow at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

[23] Four biographies about President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga have been published (in Latvian, English, French, Finnish, Italian, Russian and Spanish), and a full-length documentary film The Threefold Sun in 2008.