Myanmar human rights activist Phyoe Phyoe Aung was just a year old when her father was arrested for human rights activism and sent to prison for 20 years. He wasn’t released until she was studying to be a civil engineer.

She knew the danger of joining him in resisting their government’s actions. Nevertheless, she enlisted in the Saffron Revolution, got caught, and was sent to prison for three years.

Upon her release, she became the general secretary of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions, a member of the Democratic Education Movement, and an outspoken advocate for education reform.

She organized a march from Mandalay to Yangon to protest a new education bill that restricted academic freedom.

Parliament, she believed, should allow schools to teach in the nation’s ethnic languages, and it should make student and teacher unions legal. Myanmar police beat marchers with batons and arrested Aung and over a hundred others.

This time, Aung was sentenced to nine years. Aung was freed after Amnesty International members wrote more than 394,000 letters, Emails, and Tweets demanding her release.

She’s still fighting for academic freedom as a founder of the Wings Institute for Reconciliation, facilitating exchanges between young people of different ethnic and religious groups “to spread a national reconciliation mindset among young leaders.”