Indian-American navy veteran Shanti Sethi appointed Kamala Harris’s defence advisor.

Shanti Sethi, the first Indian-American commander of a major US Navy combat ship, was appointed as Kamala Haris’s executive secretary and defence advisor, according to reports. Shanti will be coordinating with National Security Advisor documentation across the office of the Vice President, according to her Linkedin profile. Shanti Sethi commanded the guided-missile destroyer, USS Decatur, from December 2010 to May 2012. She was also the first female commander of a US naval vessel to visit India.

When she joined the navy in 1993,  the combat exclusion law was still in effect so she was limited in what she could do. However, when she was an officer, the Exclusion Act was lifted. “I was able to move on to have a career path that was much more open to me because I was going into this very male-dominated environment,” Sethi told USA Today in an interview last year.

Sethi’s father immigrated to the US from India in the 1960s. Harris is the first-ever person of Indian origin to be elected vice-president of the United States.