(KRON) – Mexico made history this weekend with the election of the first female president in the country’s more than two hundred years of independence. Claudia Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old former mayor of Mexico City, will also be the country’s first Jewish president.
Sheinbaum, a lifelong leftist who is a close ally of the country’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also has a connection to the Bay Area. Sheinbaum has a background as a climate scientist and a Ph.D. in the field of energy technology.
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In the 1990s, she spent four years as a researcher at Berkeley Lab.
At the time, she was a doctoral student in engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. According to Berkeley Lab, she worked in the laboratory’s Energy Technologies Area, analyzing energy consumption in buildings and Mexico’s transportation sector.
She was also a contributing author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
It appears that her scientific background influences her political background, where she is believed to take a data-driven approach to governance.
“I believe in science,” she said in a 2023 interview with the Associated Press.
Observers say this support was reflected in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million took a different approach than López Obrador advocated nationally.
While the federal government downplayed the importance of testing for the coronavirus, Mexico City expanded its testing regimen. Sheinbaum imposed limits on business hours and capacity as the virus spread rapidly, even as López Obrador wanted to avoid measures that would hurt the economy.
Sheinbaum will begin her only six-year term on October 1. The Mexican Constitution does not allow presidents to be re-elected.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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