Claudia Sheinbaum: Cool-headed scientist who will lead Mexico

Claudia Sheinbaum, the former city mayor who will take office on Tuesday as Mexico's first woman president, is an environmental scientist and dedicated leftist known for keeping a cool head in times of crisis.

Sheinbaum, 62, is a close ally of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, but considered more pragmatic and less populist.

"The driving force of both is the fight for a more just society, but with important nuances," analyst and author Jorge Zepeda Patterson wrote in his latest book Presidenta.

While Lopez Obrador hails from rural southern Mexico, "Sheinbaum comes from an intellectual university environment, middle class, cosmopolitan, modern and essentially urban," he added.

She has a "more modern left" agenda that includes the issues of feminism and the environment, according to Zepeda Patterson.

Sheinbaum was born to Bulgarian and Lithuanian Jewish migrants in Mexico City during the turmoil of the early 1960s, when students and other activists were seeking to end the Institutional Revolutionary Party's long grip on power.

"I am a daughter of 1968," she often repeats in reference to the student movement.

Her mother, renowned biologist Annie Pardo, lost her job as a university professor for denouncing the massacre of students.

"At home, we talked about politics morning, noon and night," Sheinbaum was quoted as saying in a biography.

Guillermo Robles, a former classmate at the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico, remembers Sheinbaum as a serious student.

"Neither she nor I were that into socializing with everyone," he said.

Sheinbaum's magnetism as a young woman lay in her left-wing political convictions, Robles said.

She spent several years as a researcher in California, where she honed her English language skills.

In 2000, Lopez Obrador, then the newly elected mayor of the capital, appointed Sheinbaum as Mexico City's environment secretary, with an agenda to reduce pollution.

She returned to academic life after Lopez Obrador's defeat in the 2006 presidential election.

Sheinbaum was a contributing author of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In 2017, after she returned to politics, Sheinbaum faced criticism when a powerful earthquake caused a school to collapse in a southern Mexico City district where she was the local mayor, killing 26 people, including 19 children.

Sheinbaum denied that irregularities in the construction were her office's responsibility, and went on to be elected mayor of all of Mexico City the following year.

Her use of scientific methods and technological tools was seen in the Covid-19 pandemic response in the capital, though it did not prevent a high mortality rate.

"She has an impressive capacity for analysis, reading data and finding very practical solutions," said Tatiana Clouthier, a former economy minister who was a spokesperson for her election campaign.