Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's VP pick, comes from a family of lawyers and Stanford graduates. Meet the family.

A post shared by Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris)Mar 1, 2019 at 5:16am PST

When news broke that Joe Biden had picked Harris as his running mate for the 2020 election, Maya shared a moving tweet of Harris talking about their late mother. "You can't know who @KamalaHarris is without knowing who our mother was. Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today," she wrote. 

Shyamala Gopalan Harris, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, moved to the US from India in the 60s to attend the University of California, Berkeley, to study nutrition and endocrinology. 

Gopalan Harris spent her career in cancer research and worked at a number of different institutions, including McGill University and the University of Illinois. Per Forbes, some of her most important work was in breast cancer research.

She died of colon cancer in 2009 a few months after she turned 70. "One of the last questions she asked the hospice nurse was, 'Are my daughters going to be O.K.?' She was focused on being our mother until the very end," Harris wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

"There was never a question that they were Indian. I don't think she felt conflicted about it. She told the girls, 'You are Indian; you are [B]lack. You don't have to prove that you're one or the other,'" a family relative told the Los Angeles Times.