Vice President Kamala Harris Family Guide

Mother Shyamala Gopalan & Father Donald J. Harris

Shyamala Gopalan was born in south India in 1938 and Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica the same year.

In accordance with The New York Times, met in 1962 while earning their Ph.Ds at the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the Afro American Association research group. They married the following year and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris in 1964 again Maya Harris in 1967.

“They fell in love in that American way,” Harris said in his 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, “when they marched together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

However, later his parents separated.

“I knew they were very much in love, but it seemed like they would be like oil and water,” Harris wrote in her book. The Facts We Hold. “By the time I was five years old, the bond between them had weakened due to the weight of incompatibility.”

While Harris wrote that her father “remained a part of our lives” after the divorce, she noted that “it was really my mother who took the reins of raising us.”

After serving as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford and is a professor of economics, emeritus, according to his school history.

Shyamala, who died in 2009 at the age of 70, was a breast cancer researcher. Breast Cancer Action noted that “his work in isolating and isolating the progesterone gene revolutionized the medical establishment's understanding of the hormone response of breast tissue.”