Mom Shyamala Gopalan & Dad Donald J. Harris
Shyamala Gopalan was born in southern India in 1938 and Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica the same year.
According to New York TimesThey met in 1962 while serving their doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the Afro American Association study group. They got married the following year and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris 1964 and Maya Harris 1967.
“They fell in love in the most American way,” Harris said in his democratic national congressional speech 2020, “while he marched together for justice in civil rights in the 1960s.”
But her parents later shared.
“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed like they were to become like oil and water,” Harris wrote in his book The truths we have. “When I was five years old, the bond between them had given up under the importance of incompatibility.”
While Harris wrote his father “remained part of our lives” after the divorce, she noted “it was really my mother who took responsibility for our upbringing.”
After working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald went to Stanford and is a professor of economics, emeritus, Per Hans School cinema.
Shyamala, who died in 2009 at the age of 70, was a breast cancer researcher. Breast cancer measure Noted her “Work on isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptorgen transformed the medical establishment’s understanding of hormone respondivity of the breast tissue.”
