Dr Noeleen Heyzer, Distinguished Fellow, SMU School of Social Sciences and Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow, and a member of the United Nations’ Secretary General’s High Level Advisory Board on Mediation, is credited with saving the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem) – where she was its executive director from 1994 to 2007 – from financial collapse and turning it into a force fighting for women's empowerment. Her new memoir, Beyond Storms and Stars, looks back at how she overcame a difficult childhood to scale the career ladder at the United Nations.