(NewsWorthy.news) – On Sunday June 2, Mexico elected its first woman to serve as the president of the country.
In addition to making history as the first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum also broke ground as the first Jewish person to lead the country, a majority of which is Catholic. The newly elected president previously served as the mayor of Mexico City and worked as a climate scientist. She is set to take office on October 1.
Sheinbaum, 62, was born in Mexico City to a mother and father who were both professionals in the science field. Both sets of her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria and Lithuania. The new president is married to Jesús María Tarriba, who works for the Bank of Mexico as a financial risk specialist.
They were married last year after first meeting each other while attending university. Sheinbaum is a mother of two and grandmother of one. As a student, the newly elected president earned a physics degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an energy engineering PhD.
Her graduate studies, conducted in the 1990s, included four years at the University of California, Berkley, researching energy engineering. Sheinbaum became a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), within the United Nations, in 2006. While working with a group on that project, she and her team were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
To launch her career in politics, Sheinbaum served as the environment secretary under the then mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). She was appointed to this position in 2000. More than a decade later, in 2015, she went on to lead Tlalpan, the largest borough in Mexico City.
Her role as borough leader continued until 2017, when she was chosen to be the mayor of Mexico City. Following suit with her ties to AMLO, the current president who is part of the left-wing political party Morena, Sheinbaum promised during her presidential campaign to focus on similar policies sought by the current administration.
However, despite their collaboration in the past and their shared political party, Sheinbaum has said that she and her predecessor are “different people” whose political priorities will not be identical.
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