Claudia Sheinbaum

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (born 24 June 1962) is a Mexican scientist, politician, and head of government of Mexico City (equivalent to the position of Mayor). She jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was elected Mayor of Mexico City on 1 July 2018 as part of the Juntos Haremos Historia coalition. She is the first woman and the first Jew to be elected Mayor of Mexico City.

Sheinbaum has a Ph.D. in energy engineering, and is the author of over 100 articles and two books on the topics of energy, the environment, and sustainable development. She served as the Secretary of the Environment of Mexico City from 2000 to 2006 during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term as mayor, and she was the Mayor of Tlalpan from 2015 to 2017. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City.[2] Her grandparents emigrated to Mexico City from Lithuania (her father’s Ashkenazi parents, in the 1920s) and Sofia, Bulgaria (her mother’s Sephardic parents, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust), and she celebrated all the Jewish holidays at their homes.[3][2]

Both of her parents are scientists; her father, chemical engineer Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, and her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist, now professor emeritus of the Faculty of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.[4][5][3][2][6][7] Her brother is a physicist.