The Honourable Lloyd Axworthy, P.C., O.C., O.M., is currently President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Winnipeg, where he is working to renew the campus and its downtown community with the view to making post-secondary education more accessible to inner-city, Aboriginal, new immigrant and refugee students. He is also expanding the University's outreach in the areas of Aboriginal education, environmental studies, and human rights.

Dr. Axworthy's political career spanned 27 years, six of which he served in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly and 21 in the Federal Parliament, where he held a number of Cabinet positions, including Minister of Human Resources Development and Minister of Foreign Affairs. On leaving politics, he served as Director and CEO of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Colombia prior to his appointment at The University of Winnipeg.

Internationally, Dr. Axworthy became known for his advancement of the human security concept, in particular, the Ottawa Treaty - a landmark global treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Since leaving public life in 2000, Dr. Axworthy has received a number of prestigious awards and honours recognizing, for example, his leadership in the global effort to outlaw landmines, to ban the use of children as soldiers, and to bring war criminals to justice, as well as his record of outstanding public service. Dr. Axworthy has been named to Order of Manitoba and to the Order of Canada and has received honorary doctorates from 12 universities.

In 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed Lloyd Axworthy as his special envoy for Ethiopia-Eritrea to assist in implementing a peace agreement. Two years later, the Organization of American States appointed him to its Electoral Observation Mission to monitor the general elections in Peru. More recently, he served as a member of the UNDP Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor.

Dr. Axworthy currently serves as a commissioner on the Aspen Institute's Dialogue and Commission on Arctic Climate Change. He is a board member of the MacArthur Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Educational Policy Institute, and the University of the Arctic, among others. Lloyd Axworthy remains involved in international matters and lectures widely in Canada, the US and abroad. His book Navigating a New World - Canada's Global Future, was published in the fall of 2003.

Dr. Axworthy graduated in 1961 with a BA from United College (now The University of Winnipeg), and received an MA and PhD from Princeton in 1963 and 1972 respectively.