Annie Pardo Cemo

Annie Pardo Cemo (born 6 June 1940) is a Mexican cell biologist specializing in the study of the extracellular matrix. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 2023.

Early life
Annie Pardo Cemo was born in Mexico City on 6 June 1940. Her parents were Sephardic Jews from Sofia, Bulgaria, who migrated to Mexico in the 1940s due to the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.

In 1960, she married chemical engineer Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, with whom she had three children: Julio, Claudia, and Adriana. The couple participated in the Mexican Movement of 1968.

Academic career
Annie Pardo studied biology at the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She also completed her master's and doctoral degrees in biochemistry at the same university. She conducted research stays at the American universities of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri; at the University of Illinois Chicago, and at the pathology department of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

In 1980, she founded the biochemistry research laboratory at the Faculty of Sciences of UNAM. She was a "C-level" professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and was named a "level III researcher" of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores.

In May 2023, she received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in the category of physical-mathematical and natural sciences for "her research in biochemistry, lung diseases, and aging studies".

Panama Papers
Annie Pardo Cemo's name appeared in the Panama Papers, a leak of documents related to companies registered in tax havens. According to the documentation, Pardo Cemo opened multiple bank accounts between March 1990 and November 2009 in various tax havens, and had links to the company JAEM Ltd., a consortium based in the British Virgin Islands considered "an entity facilitating tax evasion and fortune concealment through tax havens".

National Science Award
In May 2023, the Secretariat of Public Education awarded the National Prize for Arts and Sciences to Annie Pardo Cemo. The award was questioned as an act of nepotism since her daughter, Claudia Sheinbaum, was then the Head of Government of Mexico City and one of the closest individuals to the President of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It was also noted that the award in 2023 was unusual because the prizes had not been issued since 2020.