Who is Kamala Harris? US senator and Joe Biden's potential running mate
California Senator Kamala Harris is being tipped as a leading contender to run alongside Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden in the upcoming US presidential election.
Ms Harris, 55, is a battle-tested former presidential candidate herself and fits the bill set out by Mr Biden, who has vowed to choose a woman as his potential vice president.
Mr Biden and is expected to announce his pick before the Democrats' national convention, which is scheduled to take place between August 17-20 and will see the 77-year-old and his vice presidential selection formally accept the party’s nomination for the November election.
Ms Harris endorsed Mr Biden in March as the Democrats' challenger to Republican President Donald Trump for the White House after dropping out of the race herself.
Here's what you need to know about her:
Who is Kamala Harris?
The daughter of Jamaican and Indian parents, Ms Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California.
She went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a law degree from the University of California and embark on a career in the law which would see her serve as a San Francisco district attorney and attorney general of California - the first African-American and first woman to do so - prior to transitioning into politics.
Ms Harris was elected to the Senate in 2016, becoming the second African-American woman and first South Asian-American senator in history, according to her website.
She has since served on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on the Budget.
During her bid for the Democratic nomination, Ms Harris pitched herself as a history-making candidate who could appeal to both progressives and moderates.
But she dropped out of the race in December 2019 after suffering a decline in the polls, saying dwindling donations had made it "harder and harder" to compete.
Her wavering views on how to solve the nation's healthcare problems and whether to embrace her past as a prosecutor were among the missteps that dragged down the campaign after its glitzy launch at the beginning of that year.
Since dropping out, Ms Harris has endorsed Mr Biden and gone on to win praise from a wide range of Democrats for being an outspoken advocate for police reform during recent mass anti-racism demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
.@JoeBiden has served our country with dignity and we need him now more than ever. I will do everything in my power to help elect him the next President of the United States. pic.twitter.com/DbB2fGWpaa
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris)
Ms Harris and Mr Biden did notably clash during a Democratic primary debate in June last year about the latter's past work with senators who favoured racial segregation and his previous opposition to a policy combating segregation in schools.
Mr Biden, who served two terms as vice-president to Barack Obama, America's first black president, later said he "destested" the segregationists' views amid a backlash over his work with with two southern Democratic senators, Mississippi's James Eastland and Georgia's Herman Talmadge, after joining the Senate himself in the 1970s.
The disagreement is not expected to harm Ms Harris' chance of serving as Mr Biden's running mate, but it did reportedly rankle some people close to the latter.
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