(KRON) — Mexico made history this weekend in electing the first woman president in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence. Claudia Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor, 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 Bay Area connection. Sheinbaum has a background as a climate scientist and a Ph.D. in energy engineering.
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During the 1990s, she spent four years at Berkeley Lab as a researcher.
At the time, she was a doctoral student in engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. According to Berkeley Lab, she worked in the lab’s Energy Technologies Area, where she analyzed energy use in buildings and the Mexican transportation sector.
She was also a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Her science background, it seems, informs her politics, where she is regarded as taking a data-driven approach to governance.
“I believe in science,” she said in a 2023 interview with the Associated Press.
Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.
While the federal government was downplaying the importance of coronavirus testing, Mexico City expanded its testing regimen. Sheinbaum set limits on businesses’ hours and capacity when the virus was rapidly spreading, even though López Obrador wanted to avoid any measures that would hurt the economy.
Sheinbaum will begin her single six-year term on Oct. 1. Mexico’s constitution does not allow presidents to be reelected.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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