After US President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign on Sunday, he and other senior Democratic politicians voiced their support for Vice President Kamala Harris. Although the situation could still change between now and the official selection of the Democratic presidential candidate in August, she is widely expected to face off against former President Donald Trump in November.

Here speaksNaturewith policy analysts and researchers about what a potential Harris administration could mean for science, health and the environment.

A background in science and justice

Health and science have accompanied Harris from an early age: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, whom Harris cites as a major influence, was a leading breast cancer researcher who died of cancer.

Much of Harris's career has revolved around criminal justice — she was district attorney in San Francisco for seven years and then attorney general of California for six years until she was elected as a U.S. senator for the state in 2017.

As a senator, Harris co-initiated efforts to increase the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce improve. She introduced legislation to support students from underrepresented populations to get jobs and work experience in STEM fields. As a candidate in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she proposed investing $60 billion to fund historically black universities and strengthen black businesses.

As vice president, Harris led the National Space Council, which is charged with advising the president on U.S. space policy and strategy. Under Harris' leadership, the committee focused on international cooperation, for example in the Artemis mission, which aims to send astronauts to the moon.

It's still unclear who Harris will choose to run alongside her if she wins the party's nomination. One possible candidate is Mark Kelly, a senator from Arizona and former astronaut, whose decades of experience in science and technology would enrich the position if elected.

Healthcare and drug prices

During the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, Harris was further to the left than Biden on health policy issues. For one thing, she favored a universal single-payer system for national health insurance — which still included a role for private insurance companies — while Biden favored the existing system he helped create as vice president.

It's still unknown whether she will support such progressive health policies or choose a path that might be more attractive to independent and centrist voters, says Alina Salganicoff, director of women's and health policy at the health policy research organization KFF, based in San Francisco, California. “I expect she will be a zealous defender of preserving and supporting the Affordable Care Act, which has also been a focus of the Biden campaign,” she says.

The Biden-Harris administration has also made drug prices a key priority, placing a cap on the price of insulin and advocating the use of "intervention rights," under which the government could intervene to set the price of innovations created with public funds. In 2019, Harris co-sponsored legislation that would have created an independent agency to determine appropriate drug prices.

Peter Maybarduk, director of the drug access program at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Public Citizen, praised these measures and hoped they would continue under a potential Harris administration. “The Biden-Harris administration has been the strongest to date in the fight against outrageous drug prices and has set the country on a long path of drug personalization,” he says.

Women's Health

Harris has been more outspoken in support of abortion rights than Biden. Last December, she launched a national tour for reproductive freedoms, becoming the first U.S. vice president ever to visit an abortion clinic.

This was a key issue for voters in the US, with 63% of the population believing that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, such as one Pew Research Center survey in Washington DC. Support for abortion rights after being defeated by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision were severely restricted in 2022, may have fueled important democratic successes last year. “The fact that she's willing to talk about this will be huge because this is a winning issue for Democrats,” said Melissa Murray, a reproductive rights expert at New York University in New York City. “It is an important difference between the two parties, and the person who can make this case most clearly to the American audience will be in a stronger position.”

Harris' approach to reproductive justice is not limited to access to contraception and abortion, Murray notes. The Vice President has also advocated for population issues related to maternal health and emphasizes the need to implicit bias against black women counteract in the healthcare system. This approach “takes seriously the needs of women of color, who may be more deeply affected by attacks on reproductive freedom, as we have seen in the two years since Dobbs,” Murray says.

Climate and environment

Harris has long advocated for action on climate and environmental justice, says Leah Stokes, a climate policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general of the state of California, Harris became a champion for communities on the front lines of fossil fuel pollution, Stokes says. Harris followed a similar path in her work on public health and the environment as a senator from 2017-2021.

If she wins in November, Harris is expected to carry both the momentum and the unprecedented investments that Biden has brought to the climate movement in the USA. This includes providing more than $1 trillion for clean energy and climate change over a decade, a legislative achievement that many energy experts say could greatly reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades.

“Harris and Biden are aligned on climate, and that’s exactly what we need,” Stokes said. “Our 2030 goals are just around the corner and we cannot afford to set back progress for another four years.”