After Amanda Nguyen was raped during her final year at Harvard and learned her untested rape kit would be routinely destroyed, she founded Rise in November 2014 to protect the civil rights of sexual assault survivors. Under her leadership, Rise wrote and unanimously passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act through the U.S. Congress in 2016, and the organization has since helped pass more than 60 additional laws across dozens of states. She previously worked in the Obama Administration’s State Department and at NASA, and on April 14, 2025 became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman to travel to space, flying aboard Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission.