Daughter of scientists and a scientist too, before being a politician. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Mexico City, 1962) is about to turn 62, the age he will be when he takes up the position of president of Mexico. She is the first woman to take office in a country where women have never had it easy. In 2024, she were two candidates to hold this position, and the election results have promoted the official candidate, who was already the first woman to serve as head of Government in Mexico Cityin 2018.

Claudia Sheinbaum He was born into a Jewish family, although does not profess religion. All of his grandparents were Jews, immigrants from Lithuania and Bulgaria: his father’s, from an Ashkenazi family settled in Mexico in the 1920s; the paternal ones, of assimilated Bulgarian Sephardim, arrived on Mexican soil in the 1940s. The Claudia Sheinbaum’s parents are scientists: he, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was a prominent chemist; She, Annie Pardo, is a cellular biologist specialized in the study of the extracellular matrix, National Science Award winner in 2023. The two formed a marriage, also involved in Mexican student activism.

A childhood among scientists ended up taking Claudia Sheinbaum to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where in 1989 she graduated in physics; Five years later she obtained her master’s degree in Energy Engineering and she was the first woman to enter the PhD in Energy Engineering at UNAM. But he also inherited activism from his parents, and entered into student protests for the rights of young people rejected from UNAM, in addition to helping in the founding of the University Student Council (CEU), the seed of what would later become the youth arm. of the Party of the Democratic Revolution.

It was also in his period as student activist when, in addition, he formed his first family. In 1987 she married her university classmate, Carlos Imaz; With him she had her first (and only, biologically speaking) daughter, Mariana. The Sheinbaum Imaz couple separated in 2016 by mutual agreement. An extensive experience focused on environmental studies prompted her to enter politics, hand in hand with the environmental sector: in the year 2000, the now outgoing president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and then head of Government of the Federal District ( DF) designated her Environment Secretary. But also to be part of the group that later received the Nobel Peace Prize, to which Al Gore also belonged: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

After her time as Secretary of the Environment of the DF, she was the first woman elected as head of delegation in Tlalpan, in 2015, although he left office two years later to compete in the elections for the head of Government of the Mexican capital for Together We Will Make History, a coalition formed by the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and other formations. From that candidacy, the following achievement arose: In 2018, she became the first woman elected to the head of government of Mexico City.thanks to more than 47% of the votes cast —and the second woman to hold this position, after Rosario Robles, who did so as a substitute.