Cynthia López Castro is a 2024 Millennium fellow and was a member of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies from 2018 to 2024. She was elected senator in the June 2024 Mexican elections. Since March 2023, she has been president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) Bureau of Women Parliamentarians, which aims to drive forward the gender equality agenda, women’s rights, and empowerment. López Castro was first elected at the age of twenty-eight as a member of the Congress of Mexico City serving from 2015 to 2018. In 2017, at the age of thirty, she participated in the drafting of a new Constitution for Mexico City, and she was one of the main proponents of the inclusion of a youth quota in the city’s electoral law.

A youth-rights advocate, she was one of the promoters of constitutional reform in Mexico in 2023, advocating the reduction of the age at which people could stand for election, changing it from twenty-one to eighteen. A member of the IPU since 2018, she has been a member of the board of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians. In 2022, López Castro was awarded the IPU’s first Cremer-Passy Prize at the 145th IPU Assembly in Kigali, Rwanda. The prize is awarded to parliamentarians who make an outstanding contribution to the defense and promotion of the IPU’s objectives, as well as to those who contribute to a more united, fair, secure, sustainable, and equitable world. She holds a PhD in public administration and a certificate on public leadership from the Harvard Kennedy School. She also holds a master’s degree in government and politics from George Washington University. She is currently enrolled in a second master’s program on anticorruption at the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Austria.