Claudia Sheinbaum facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Claudia Sheinbaum
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Sheinbaum in 2020
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| Head of Government of Mexico City | |
| Assumed office 5 December 2018 |
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| Preceded by | José Ramón Amieva |
| Delegational Chief of Tlalpan | |
| In office 1 October 2015 – 6 December 2017 |
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| Preceded by | Héctor Hugo Hernández Rodríguez |
| Succeeded by | Fernando Hernández Palacios |
| Secretary of the Environment of the Federal District | |
| In office 5 December 2000 – 15 May 2006 |
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| Mayor | Andrés Manuel López Obrador |
| Preceded by | Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez |
| Succeeded by | Eduardo Vega López |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo
24 June 1962 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Political party | National Regeneration Movement (since 2014) |
| Other political affiliations |
Party of the Democratic Revolution (1989–2014) |
| Spouse(s) |
Carlos Ímaz Gispert
(m. 1987–2016) |
| Children | 2 |
| Education | National Autonomous University of Mexico (BS, MS, PhD) University of California, Berkeley |
| Signature |  |
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (born 24 June 1962) is a Mexican scientist, politician, and head of government of Mexico City, a position equivalent to a state governor. She was elected on 1 July 2018 as part of the Juntos Haremos Historia coalition. She is the second woman and the first Jew to be elected to this position in 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. She contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. In 2018, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. Sheinbaum has been widely mentioned as a possible candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
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Early life
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her father's Ashkenazi parents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s; her mother's Sephardic parents emigrated there from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays at her grandparents' homes. Both of her parents are scientists: her father, chemical engineer Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, and her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist, professor emeritus of the Faculty of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her brother is a physicist.
Academic career
Sheinbaum studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she earned an undergraduate degree ('89), followed by a master's ('94) and a Ph.D. ('95) in energy engineering. She completed the work for her doctoral thesis in four years (1991–94) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, where she analyzed the use of energy in Mexico's transportation, published studies on the trends of Mexican building energy use, and obtained a Ph.D. in energy engineering and physics.
In 1995 she joined the faculty at UNAM's Institute of Engineering. She was a researcher at the Institute of Engineering and is a member of both the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In 1999 she received the prize of best UNAM young researcher in engineering and technological innovation.
In 2006 Sheinbaum returned to UNAM, after a period in government, publishing articles in scientific journals.
In 2007, she joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the United Nations in the field of energy and industry, as a contributing co-author on the topic "Mitigation of climate change" for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. The group won the Nobel Peace Prize that year. In 2013, she co-authored the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report alongside 11 other experts in the field of industry.
Early political career
During her time as a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she was a member of the Consejo Estudiantil Universitario (University Student Council), a group of students that would become the founding youth movement of the Mexican Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
She was the Secretary of the Environment of Mexico City from 5 December 2000, having been appointed on 20 November 2000 to the cabinet of the Head of Government of Mexico City Andrés Manuel López Obrador. During her term, which concluded in May 2006, she was responsible for the construction of an electronic vehicle-registration center for Mexico City. She also oversaw the introduction of the Metrobus, a rapid transit bus with dedicated lanes, and the construction of the second story of the Anillo Periférico, Mexico City's ring road.
López Obrador included Sheinbaum in his proposed cabinet for the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources as part of his campaign for the 2012 Mexican general election. In 2014 she joined Lopez Obrador's splinter movement which broke away from the mainstream Mexican left-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution. She served as Secretary of the Environment in 2015.
Mayor of Tlalpan
From the end of 2015, Sheinbaum served as the Mayor of Tlalpan. She resigned from the position upon receiving the nomination for candidacy of the mayor of Mexico City for the Juntos Haremos Historia (Together We Will Make History) coalition, consisting of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), the Labor Party (PT), and the Social Encounter Party (PES).
Mayor of Mexico City
On 1 July 2018, Sheinbaum was elected to a six-year term as the head of the government of the Federal District of Mexico City, defeating six other candidates. During the campaign, Sheinbaum was accused by the PAN of being responsible for the collapse of an elementary school in a 7.1 level earthquake that killed 19 children in 2017. She became both Mexico City's first elected female mayor, and its first Jewish mayor.
Tenure
In June 2019, Sheinbaum announced a new six-year environmental plan. It includes reducing air pollution by 30%, planting 15 million trees, banning single-use plastics and promoting recycling, building a new waste separation plant, providing water service to every home, constructing 100 kilometers of corridors for the exclusive use of trolleybus lines and the Mexico City Metrobús system, and constructing and installing solar water heaters and solar panels.
In September 2019, Sheinbaum announced a 40 billion peso (US$2 billion) investment to modernize the Mexico City Metro over the next five years, including modernization, re-strengthening, new trains, improving stations, stairways, train control and automation, user information, and payment systems.
Sheinbaum was nominated by the City Mayors Foundation for the World Mayor prize in 2021 in North America for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.
2021 Metro Line 12 disaster
On 3 May 2021, a train was traveling on Mexico City Metro Line 12, when a girder supporting the overpass on which the train was traveling collapsed, killing 26 and injuring more than 70. Some critics said Sheinbaum and other leaders should have worked harder to improve the Metro's infrastructure. Some political observers have suggested that the political fallout from the crash may harm Sheinbaum's potential candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.
Personal life
In 1986, Sheinbaum met politician Carlos Ímaz Gispert, to whom she was married from 1987 to 2016. She has one daughter from this marriage (Mariana, born in 1988, who in 2019 was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz), and also became stepmother to Rodrigo Ímaz Alarcón (born in 1982; now a filmmaker).
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico, Sheinbaum tested positive for COVID-19 on 27 October 2020, but was asymptomatic.
See also
In Spanish: Claudia Sheinbaum para niños
