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Maya Lakshmi Harris was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and Montreal, Quebec. She is a daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer researcher who emigrated from Chennai, India in 1960; and Donald Harris, a Jamaican-born Stanford University economics professor, now emeritus. Her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan was a career civil servant with federal Government of India. She and her older sister, Kamala, were raised with beliefs from Baptis

Legal

After receiving her J.D. degree from Stanford Law School, Harris served as a law clerk for United States District Court Judge James Ware in the Northern District of California. In 1994, Harris joined the San Francisco law firm of Jackson Tufts Cole & Black, LLP, working in civil

Advocacy

Harris was a Senior Associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute dedicated to advancing economic and social equity. In that capacity, she organized conferences around police-community relations and advocated for police reform, authoring two national publicati

Philanthropy

In 2008, Harris was appointed Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. The program focused on promoting effective governance, increasing democratic participation, and protecting and advancing human rights worldwide, and she led a global team in mak

Harris authored the essay "Fostering Accountable Community-Centered Policing", which appeared in the 2006 book The Covenant with Black America. She was also a contributing author to The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, publishing the essay "The Gender Wage Gap: A Civil Rights Issue for Our Time." Harris has authored publications which include, Community-Centered Policing: A Force for Change, a report highlighting community-centered policing practices nationwide, and O

In 1997, the Young Lawyers Division of the National Bar Association honored her with the Junius W. Williams Young Lawyer of the Year Award. The following year, she was named one of the Top 20 Up and Coming Lawyers Under 40 by the San Francisco Daily Journal. In 2006, Harris was named one of 10 notable Desis of the year. She was awarded the Women Who Dare Award from Girls, Inc. in 2008. In 2009, Harris was named to the first class of The Root 100, celebrating the "leadership, service and excellen

Harris has been married to Tony West since July 1998. Maya and Tony were both in the class of 1992 at Stanford Law School, where they became friends but did not start a relationship until after graduation. Her daughter Meena Harris graduated from Stanford in 2006 and from Harvard Law School in 2012. Her sister Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States. In 2020, Harris revealed she had been diagnosed with lupus at the age of 22.