Shyamala Gopalan died in 2009 at the age of 70.
When US Vice President Kamala Harris talks about her South Asian identity, it’s usually in the context of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan. The same was true on Thursday during Ms Harris’ speech on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). “My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, travelling from India to California with an unshakable dream,” Ms Harris said during her speech. “She taught us to never complain about injustice, but to do something about it,” she added.
Now, as Kamala Harris secured the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, here’s everything to know about her mother, Dr Shyamala Gopalan Harris.
Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher, died in 2009 at the age of 70 of colon cancer. She was born and raised in Chennai (then called Madras). According to USA Today, she was born to a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, and she was the eldest of four.
At just 19, soon after she graduated from the University of Delhi, Ms Gopalan defied cultural norms by pursuing a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her decision to move to the United States was a bold one, especially for a young woman from a conservative Tamil Brahmin community.
After moving to the US, Ms Gopalan almost immediately gravitated to the Black community and found a common cause in the Civil Rights Movement. At one such meeting in 1962, she met Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica who was pursuing a doctorate in economics. The two got married a year later, in 1963.
In 1964, at age 25, Ms Gopalan earned her doctorate and gave birth to Kamala Harris. Two years later, she gave birth to Maya Harris, who is now a civil rights champion. But the marriage didn’t last and the couple divorced in 1971.
Ms Gopalan raised her two daughters in the highly diverse working community in the Berkeley Flats neighbourhood, as per USA Today. During her DNC speech, Ms Harris said that despite her mother’s success, her life as a new immigrant was often marred by racism.
“My mother was a brilliant 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” she said. “As the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But my mother never lost her cool.”
Ms Gopalan went on to become a distinguished breast cancer researcher. Her work took her all over the world, doing research in France and Canada.
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According to her obituary published in the San Francisco Chronicle, she began her career conducting research at the school’s zoology department and its cancer research lab. She published numerous notable research papers and spent time at many of the top research institutions in the US and around the world.
Ms Gopalan worked at the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin and abroad in France and Italy. She spent 16 years at McGill University’s Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital in Canada. During the last decade of her work, she returned to UC Berkeley to conduct research within the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Ms Gopalan received numerous honours for her work as a research scientist. Notably, her discovery related to the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue led to many subsequent advances, according to Breast Cancer Action.
Notably, since becoming vice president, Kamala Harris has continued talking about the advice she got from her mother. In her 2019 memoir, ‘The Truths We Hold’, Ms Harris also wrote, “Mommy, you are the star of this book because you are the reason for everything. There is no title or honour on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter.”