A university student has beaten 200 rivals to win a prize for her research project.

Chantelle Bacchus, 21, from Chingford, won the British Conference of Undergraduate Research award for her poster at the conference in Plymouth last week.

It described her project on the possibility of a people to choose its own government while working while working within international laws.

The University of Reading student said: “I was totally shocked to win. My poster was next to a Cambridge University poster which had been receiving a lot of attention.  I was so certain that I would not win that I was still eating my lunch when my name was called out.”

She won £200 worth of Amazon vouchers as a prize.