Hla Hla received her Master’s degree in 2016 from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, with an emphasis on educational policy and development. Her undergraduate degree in Education was from William Penn University in Iowa, and she also received a leadership diploma from the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. The pivotal moment from Policy work to ecotechnology was when Hla Hla was selected for the Singularity University program for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, which focused on addressing global grand challenges.

Recently in 2021 Harvard University recognized her public service and advancement in digital innovation with an award on Digital Innovation award. In 2019, Hla Hla was one of the Social Entrepreneurs of the Year awardees of the Schwab Foundation, the World Economic Forum’s sister organization. She also received the Emerging Young Leader Award from William Penn University in 2018.

Together with her husband, Hla Hla co-founded 360ed, an Educational Technology social enterprise in Yangon, Myanmar for five years. The couple is on a mission to democratize access to quality education by leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) on simple mobile phones. Together with a team of 70+ full-timers, they built new engaging self-directed distance-learning tools for K-12 students to bring scalable, immediate and exponential impacts in transforming the way human beings learn and teach.