Professor Shirley Williams is a former Labour cabinet minister and co-founded the Liberal Democrats, serving as its first President from 1982 to 1988. She also served as leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords from 2001 until retiring from that position in 2004. She is professor emeritus of Elective Politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Shirley Williams was educated at Somerville College Oxford, where she was elected the first woman Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University New York.

Shirley started her career as a journalist with the Daily Mirror and the Financial Times, then became general secretary of the Fabian Society until her election as Labour MP for Hitchin (later Hertford and Stevenage) in 1964. She served in the Cabinet (1974–79) as Secretary of State for Prices and Consumer Protection, Paymaster General and Secretary of State for Education and Science. She lost her parliamentary seat in 1979 but, after co-founding the Social Democratic Party in 1981 was its first elected MP, winning a by-election in Crosby, Merseyside in the same year.

She became Baroness Williams of Crosby in 1993 and was spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats on foreign affairs in the Lords from 1998 to 2001.

Professor Williams also directed Project Liberty, which focused on Eastern Europe. She is a Board Member at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She was a member of the Advisory Council to the UN Secretary-General on the Fourth World Women’s Conference, and a member of the European Commission’s Comite de Sages on social and civil rights. She was also a President of Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) from 2002 to 2006.

Shirley Williams is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, a board member of the Nuclear Threat Initiative in Washington DC and a trustee of the Century Foundation in New York. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations International Advisory Committee and serves on several other boards, including the Moscow School of Political Studies and the International Committee on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND).

She is the author of several books including Politics is for People (1981) A Job to Live (1985), God and Caesar (2003) and her autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves (2009).

She is the recipient of 12 honorary doctorates and a frequent broadcaster.