Did you know?

Shyamala Gopalan, the mother of Vice President Kamala Harris, earned her PhD from UC Berkeley in 1964. In 1958, at the age of 19, she moved from India to enroll in the graduate program in nutrition and endocrinology—which is now a part of the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at Rausser College of Natural Resources. Her dissertation, supervised by nutrition professor Richard L. Lyman, focused on an inhibitor protein in whole wheat flour. Dr. Gopalan went on to become a leading cancer researcher. She passed away in 2009.