Profile: Myanmar's new Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, chairperson of Myanmar's ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), was appointed on Wednesday as the country's new foreign minister, concurrently holding three other portfolios in the new government.

Suu Kyi, a member of parliament to the House of Representatives (Lower House) from Yangon's Kawhmu constituency, was born on June 19, 1945, in Yangon, Myanmar, which was formerly known as Burma.

Her father General Aung San, the then de facto prime minister of British Burma, was assassinated in 1947. Her mother Daw Khin Kyi was appointed the ambassador to India in 1960.

Suu Kyi obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford in 1969, and in 1972, she married Michael Aris, a scholar in Bhutanese studies.

She had two children in 1973 and 1977, and the family spent the 1970s and 1980s in England, the United States and India.

In 1988, Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar to care for her dying mother, and her life took a dramatic turn.

She was general secretary of the NLD when the party was formed in September 1988.

In 1989, the government placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, and she spent 15 of the next 21 years in detention.

In 1990, a general election, sponsored by the military, was held with her party winning more than 80 percent of the parliamentary seats. The election results were ignored by the junta. Twenty years later, the junta formally annulled the results.

In 1991, Suu Kyi won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and she was finally released from house arrest in November 2010.

In 2012, she competed in a by-election and won a parliamentary seat with the NLD in the Lower House.

She was late assigned by the Lower House as the House's chairperson of the Committee for Rule of Law and Tranquility. Endit