Read about the Westminster Alumni Award finalists in this category and vote for who you think deserves to win. Voting closes at 11.59pm BST on Monday 20 July.
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Finalists
Elena Efstathiou
Sport and Exercise Nutrition MSc, 2025
On Elena Efstathiou’s graduation day, she received an offer to join Brentford Football Club as First Team Nutritionist, making a memorable transition from study to elite professional sport.
At just 23 years old, Elena has established herself within a high-performance environment, working closely with the Lead Nutritionist to support player performance, health, wellbeing and recovery. Within her first three months at the club, she was awarded the Winter Employee Award for going above and beyond, with her success story shared across the organisation and on screens within the stadium and training ground.
She has navigated the challenges of being the only permanently employed woman within the club's performance medical team, demonstrating resilience, professionalism and the ability to thrive in a demanding, male-dominated setting. Her competence and work ethic have been recognised through being entrusted to coordinate match-day nutrition earlier than expected, reflecting the trust placed in her abilities and her rapid career progression.
Malek Romdhane
Sustainability Management and Innovation MSc, 2022
Malek Romdhane is a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Youth Negotiator on Climate Adaptation and Action for Climate Empowerment and has attended six COPs. She was a Loss and Damage Fellow of the New Generation Programme, Fellow at the UN Office in Geneva on the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030, and Senior Consultant and Assistant Manager at KPMG. She is currently Operations Manager and Adaptation Project Lead at the Loss and Damage Collaboration, translating research into actionable knowledge and tracking negotiations.
As Regional Focal Point for the UN International Federation of Youth, Malek co-led the creation of the Youth Development Plan and Agenda and presented at the UN 2023 Water Conference. As UN Conference of Youth (COY16) Regional Coordinator for North and Central Africa, she helped draft the Global Youth Statement, read at the COP26 Youth Headline Event. Malek was nominated as a Young Climate Champion by Tunisia's Ministry of Environment.
Mara Cracaleanu
Film BA, 2023
Mara Cracaleanu is a Romanian-born, London-based film producer. She is the founder of Melancholia Pictures, a production company working across the UK and Romania. She was recently recognised in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2026 Entertainment section.
Her work has earned over 70 international awards and selections at festivals including BFI Flare, Torino Film Festival, FIPADOC and TIFF Romania, with screenings at venues including the XV Florence Biennale, Hollywood Women's Film Institute and UCLA.
Her recent docu-series project, now in development with HBO, received the Council of Europe Co-Development Award and took part in the Institute of Documentary Film’s Ex Oriente Lab. She has pitched at major industry platforms including MIA Market, East Doc Platform, Docs Ireland and When East Meets West, and was recently selected for the prestigious European Genre Forum.
Mara participates in festivals and markets such as Cannes, Berlinale and Venice, and is a jury member at three US-based film festivals.
Nirusan Hariharan
Computer Science with Industrial Experience BSc, 2025
Nirusan Hariharan recently became the first Sri Lankan researcher ever selected for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking and Computing (QCNC 2026), the world's premier quantum computing conference, where his paper was accepted alongside submissions from PhD candidates at MIT, Stanford and Oxford.
Nirusan pioneered the world's first quantum deep learning framework for detecting encrypted malicious network traffic without decryption and preserving user privacy while identifying cyber threats. His research introduced quantum computing into cryptographic network security for the first time globally and created the first Quantum Gated Recurrent Unit model for cybersecurity applications.
His groundbreaking work earned him the Best Undergraduate Research Award from the University of Moratuwa and the Best Final Year Research Project Award from the Informatics Institute of Technology Sri Lanka. Published in IEEE conference proceedings, his research achieved 99.75% accuracy on real-world datasets, outperforming classical approaches.