Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's new vice president-elect as Joe Biden has been announced as president-elect of the United States.
As Biden won the state of Pennsylvania to surpass the 270 electoral college votes needed for victory, VP Kamala took to twitter to say: ‘This election is about so much more than @JoeBiden or me. It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.’
The California Senator, 55, is a battle-tested former presidential candidate who will now work closely with Biden, who had vowed to elect a female vice president.
She is the first black woman and first person of Indian descent to be elected into the White House, and only the fourth woman to be chosen on a presidental ticket.
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.
After dropping out, Ms Harris endorsed Mr Biden and went 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) March 8, 2020
Ms Harris and Mr Biden clashed 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 "detested" 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.
