Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico's first woman president on Sunday, preliminary official results showed. 

The ruling Morena party candidate won around 58 to 60 percent of votes, more than 30 percentage points ahead of her main opposition rival Xochitl Galvez, the National Electoral Institute announced after a quick count.

Sheinbaum, 61, was a climate scientist and is considered by the media as a protege of the outgoing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

In 1995, she earned her doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Preparing her doctoral thesis, she spent time at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. 

Sheinbaum pursued a teaching and academic career in the years that followed, including a stint on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

Her political career kicked off in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then-Mexico City's newly elected mayor, tapped her to be his environment chief. 

She left City Hall to take on the role of chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador's first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.

In 2015, she was elected to run Mexico City's largest borough, Tlalpan.

In that post, she faced allegations of poor management after a 2017 earthquake caused the collapse of an elementary school, killing 19 children, Reuters reported. The school had only recently been expanded with an extra floor.

But that did not stop her from notching up a historic election victory as the capital's first woman mayor in 2018, the same year that Lopez Obrador's third run for the presidency proved successful in a landslide win.

During her tenure, she won plaudits for improving security with the capital's murder rate falling 50 percent.

Sheinbaum has promised to continue all of Lopez Obrador's policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.

(With input from agencies)