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Meet this year's nominees and vote for your winner.

How to vote

You can vote using our secure online form. All alumni, staff and students of the University are eligible to vote. Voting closes at 5pm on 26th May 2025. The winner will be announced in July 2025.

Meet our 2025 finalists

Hammed Kayode Alabi

Hammed Kayode Alabi

MSc Africa and International Development, 2021 

Hammed Kayode Alabi is an EdTech (education technology) leader and social entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and author, dedicated to advocating for education, youth empowerment, and sustainable development.  

Originally from Nigeria, he overcame a challenging upbringing marked by personal loss and financial struggles, which inspired him to empower young leaders in his community through education.  

By the age 15, he was teaching in a rural school in Lagos. In 2017 he founded the Kayode Alabi Leadership and Career Initiative (KLCI), a not-for-profit social enterprise that prepares young people in underserved and displaced communities in Nigeria and Africa for work. With over 200 volunteers across 14 states in Nigeria, KLCI has provided new skills, leadership development and career readiness training to 10,000+ secondary school students and young people. He also created the teachers-in-training fellowship that uses technology to empower 70 student-teachers in Nigeria with innovative teaching methodologies.    

Outside of KLCI, Hammed has worked as a Regional Manager and is currently a Board Member with Peace First, a non-profit organisation that teaches young people about changemaking in over 150 countries.    

Hammed has written three books and authored over 192 articles focusing on personal, community, and global development. He also spoke at the Pre-Summit of the Transforming Education Summit at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris where he shared his vision to revolutionise 21st-century skills-based education to over 100 ministers of education across the world.  

In 2023, Hammed founded Skill2Rural.Org, an EdTech start-up, which reached over 415 users in just eight months and educators signed up on the platform are currently reaching 128,000+ young people across Africa. He also recently released Rafiki AI - Africa’s first Generative AI career advisor for underserved and displaced youth, which has already reached 2,000+ users from 44 countries.  

Hammed currently works as a Transitions Coordinator with the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Programme at the University of Edinburgh where he supports African Scholars transitioning into graduate career roles. He also coordinates the programme's alumni activities and is an alumnus himself. 

His work has earned him several awards including the US Consul General Award and Africa Talent of the Future. 

Giselle Gonzales

Giselle Gonzales

MSc Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2019

Giselle Gonzales is the Founder and CEO of EqualReach, an award-winning social enterprise connecting vetted teams of displaced tech talent with dignified digital work. Having worked for some of the most well-known companies in the world - including Amazon.com, AWS, the Walt Disney Company, and National Geographic - Giselle leverages technology, storytelling and impact sourcing to empower displaced communities and form bridges between the public and private sector.

Giselle has been working with displaced communities for the last nine years, starting as a freelancer herself in 2015-2016 on assignment to document stories along Europe's refugee route during the Syrian crisis. After experiencing that journey first hand and mapping the key supporting partners from Greece to Germany, she collaborated with entrepreneurs who were using technology to build solutions for those most impacted by the crisis.

That experience shaped her approach to use business and technology as a solution for humanitarian challenges, which she returned to school for in 2018 for an MSc in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the University of Edinburgh. There, she began researching the rise of digital work among forcibly displaced people and has since been advising and advocating for their fair economic and digital inclusion, with her work featured by the World Bank, International Labour Organisation, UNHCR, Santander, One Young World, and more, including delivering the latest Jubilee Lecture at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

She built Amazon’s first team-based impact sourcing solution to send digital work to refugee talent and her experience overcoming the most common hurdles that both businesses and refugees face, led her to start EqualReach to address these challenges arm-in-arm with industry leaders.

EqualReach is on a mission to change the way the private sector outsources for good -creating a fair-trade version of a freelancing marketplace, but with a team and project-based model that funnels livelihood opportunities to some of the world’s most marginalised communities via web or mobile-based digital work. This enables upskilled talent to access paid digital projects that exist in nearly every organisation but aren't accessible for most refugees and makes it easy for businesses to source impactfully.

Hana Mahmood

Hana Mahmood

PhD Global Health, 2022

Hana is a public health expert and researcher specialising in health informatics and mHealth (mobile health) technologies. 

She found her calling in the streets of Rawalpindi, in her native Pakistan, where overcrowded clinics struggle to meet the needs of young mothers and infants. She wasn't raised in a family of doctors, nor did she set out to become a global health leader. But early on in Rawalpindi, Hana saw something that changed everything - a mother cradling her lifeless child outside the clinic, unaware that her son had pneumonia, a disease that was treatable and preventable. That moment became the seed of a lifelong mission.

Years later, as a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, Hana took that memory with her and transformed it into action. Her PhD research focused on using mobile technology to educate caregivers about not only pneumonia symptoms but also adequate nutrition, especially in hard-to-reach communities. What began as a study turned into a movement; more than 60,000 caregivers across Pakistan have now received life-saving information, right on their mobile phones.

Hana didn’t stop there. Despite having better career opportunities abroad, she still returned to Pakistan. For the last 12 years, she has worked for NeoVentive Solutions, a research organisation that focuses on improving maternal and child health and recently became its Chief of Global Health. 

One of her most ground-breaking contributions was leading fieldwork for Pakistan’s first national psychiatric morbidity survey, which involved months in the field, hundreds of team members, and late-night data checks. The survey gave voice to more than 11,000 households and forced mental health into the spotlight of national policy.

Hana has led over 35 large-scale studies, but more importantly, she has turned research findings into national health policies that impact millions of children.

She’s trained more than 250 researchers, represented Pakistan on global health platforms including WHO and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and received awards for innovations in nutrition and AI diagnostics.

But ask Hana what drives her, and she’ll tell you it’s the child outside that clinic in Rawalpindi, who could have been saved if someone had acted sooner.

Jimmy Paul

Jimmy Paul

MA Geography, 2012 MSc Integrated Service Improvement: Health and Social Care, 2015 

Jimmy’s life and career has been driven by one mission - to affect real, lasting change for people whose voices are too often unheard. Growing up around violence, and spending much of his childhood in the ‘care system’, his passion is rooted in his own journey, which is why he works to ensure others experience love and care in their early years.

In 2023, aged 33, Jimmy became the youngest ever Head of Scotland’s critically acclaimed Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), drawing on his wide range of professional and personal experiences to oversee prevention programmes and to break cycles of harm. Under his leadership, the Unit is building on its pioneering legacy, which has helped cut Glasgow’s homicide rate by 60% since its inception in 2005, and Scotland continues to be a global leader in violence prevention, building safer and brighter futures.

Previously, Jimmy was a Co-Chair at Scotland’s landmark Independent Care Review, writing conclusions that informed ‘The Promise’, a radical new vision to transform the experiences of children in Scotland with the voices of those who experienced state care both heard and acted upon. His earlier work as Permanence Consultant at Celcis, heading up the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Scotland, and his early career in the NHS, further reflect his unwavering commitment to marginalised communities, ensuring they have real influence over decisions that affect their lives.

Jimmy’s legacy of value-driven leadership has earned him international recognition from the World Economic Forum and the British Council, where he shared his vision for change alongside global leaders, The Elders, establishing him as a transformative force for change.

Jimmy graduated with a 2:1 degree from the University of Edinburgh in 2012 and was an active member of student life, including serving as player-manager of the multi-championship winning intramural football team, Aston Vica.

Teamwork, leadership and empowering others are core traits that Jimmy honed through his time at Edinburgh University. He now leads some of the most important work in Scotland - gaining significant international attention – and continues to prove that it is possible to redesign systems to build a safer, happier and more inclusive world.

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