Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris' Stepdaughter, Shares 'Crazy' Journey

Mom Shyamala Gopalan and 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 The New York Timesthey met in 1962 while earning their doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the Afro American Association study group. They married the following year and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris in 1964 and Maya Harris in 1967.

“They fell in love in the most American way,” Harris said in her speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, “while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

However, his parents later separated.

“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed like they would become like oil and water,” Harris wrote in his book. The truths we hold. “By the age of five, the bond between them had broken under 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 care of our upbringing.”

After working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford and is, according to him, professor emeritus of economics. school biography.

Shyamala, who died in 2009 at the age of 70, was a breast cancer researcher. Action against breast cancer noted that “her work isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene transformed the medical establishment's understanding of the hormonal responsiveness of breast tissue.”