Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted

Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted (born 1949) is a specialist in nutrition-sensitive approaches to aquatic food systems. She is a dual national of Trinidad and Tobago and Denmark. It was announced on 11 May 2021 that she was the winner of the 2021 World Food Prize, the first woman of Asian ancestry to be awarded the prize.

Early life Thilsted was born in 1949 on Trinidad in the small village of Reform near the town of San Fernando. Her family were descendants of Indian migrants recruited to go to Trinidad to work on sugar plantations. She grew up in a fourth-generation household. As a child she worked in her grandfather’s shop and also helped her mother run the local postal service. She attended Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando from the age of ten.

Thilsted studied at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine in Trinidad where she earned a BSc. in Tropical Agriculture in 1971. Subsequently she worked as an agricultural officer in Tobago, a small island north of Trinidad, where she was the first and only woman in the ministry of agriculture, and where she met her husband, Finn Thilsted. After marrying, they moved to his home in Denmark, where she did post-graduate studies, being awarded a PhD in Physiology of Nutrition from the Danish Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (now part of the University of Copenhagen). She taught at the same university, where she became an associate professor. 2021. World Food Prize. 2020. Honorary Doctorate in Agricultural Science, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences