COLUMBIA, S.C. — Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘s pick to be his running mate in his independent bid for president, brings youth and considerable wealth to Kennedy’s long-shot campaign but is little known outside Silicon Valley.

Shanahan, 38, is a California lawyer and philanthropist. Shanahan leads the Bia-Echo Foundation, an organization she founded to direct money toward issues including women’s reproductive science, criminal justice reform and environmental causes. She also is a Stanford University fellow and was the founder and chief executive of ClearAccessIP, a patent management firm that was sold in 2020.

On Tuesday, Shanahan talked about her hardscrabble upbringing in Oakland, the daughter of a mother who immigrated from China and an Irish and German-American father “plagued by substance abuse” who “struggled to keep a job.” Touching on her family’s reliance on government assistance, Shanahan said that, although she had become “very wealthy later on in life,” she felt she could relate to Americans being “just one misfortune away from disaster.”