Matching family tree profiles for Kamala Harris, 49th Vice President of the USA
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About Kamala Harris, 49th Vice President of the USA
Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th and current vice president of the United States since 2021, under President Joe Biden. She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the first African-American and first Asian-American vice president. A member of the Democratic Party, she was previously a U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021 and the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017.
Born in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her law career in the office of the district attorney (DA) of Alameda County, before being recruited to the San Francisco DA's Office and later the city attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2003, she was elected DA of San Francisco. She was elected attorney general of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. Harris served as the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021; she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African-American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the U.S. Senate.
As a senator, Harris advocated for gun control laws, the DREAM Act, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, federal legalization of cannabis, as well as healthcare and taxation reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
Harris sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination but withdrew from the race prior to the primaries. Biden selected her to be his running mate, and their ticket went on to defeat the then incumbent president and vice president, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, in the 2020 election. Harris and Biden were inaugurated on January 20, 2021. After Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 presidential election, Harris launched her own campaign for president with Biden's endorsement.
Family life
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California,on October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast cancer research. She moved to the United States from India as a 19-year-old graduate student in 1958, after studying home science at Lady Irwin College in New Delhi. After studying nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, she received her PhD in 1964. Kamala Harris's father, Donald J. Harris, is Jamaican American of Afro-Jamaican ancestry. He is a Stanford University professor of economics (emeritus) who arrived in the United States from British Jamaica in 1961, for graduate study at UC Berkeley, receiving a PhD in economics in 1966. Harris' parents divorced when she was seven.
She has a sister, Maya, who is a lawyer and MSNBC political analyst; her brother-in-law, Tony West, is general counsel of Uber and a former United States Department of Justice senior official. Her niece, Meena, is the founder of the Phenomenal Women Action Campaign and former head of strategy and leadership at Uber.
Harris met her future husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, through a mutual friend who set up Harris and Emhoff on a blind date in 2013. Emhoff, who was born in a Jewish family, was an entertainment lawyer who became partner-in-charge at Venable LLP's Los Angeles office. Harris and Emhoff were married on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California. Harris is stepmother to Emhoff's two children, Cole and Ella, from his previous marriage to the film producer Kerstin Emhoff. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Sources
- Ancestry.com. California Birth Index, 1905-1995 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005. < link > Accessed 22 July 2024.
- "Kamala Harris." Wikipedia, revision of 22 July 2024. < link > Accessed 22 July 2024.
- Subramanian, Courtney. "In Zambia, Kamala Harris explores her family's roots." The Los Angeles Times, published 6 April 2023. < link > Accessed 22 July 2024.
- Tolan, Casey. "How Kamala Harris' immigrant parents shaped her life — and her political outlook." The San Jose Mercury News, published 10 February 2019, revision of 11 August 2020. < link > Accessed 11 August 2020.
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Kamala Harris, 49th Vice President of the USA's Timeline
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October 20, 1964
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Oakland, Alameda County, California, United States
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