UWI Mona Honours Our President Adrian Dunkley with the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award

The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona has named our President, Adrian Dunkley, the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award recipient. The citation reads plainly: "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean." For the Caribbean AI Association, a body founded on the argument that this region can build its own AI rather than only consume other people's, that citation is the argument in one sentence.

What UWI Actually Recognised

Adrian is a physicist, an entrepreneur and an AI scientist with 15 years of applied AI work behind him. He founded StarApple AI, the first company established in the Caribbean specifically around artificial intelligence, and built the region's first AI teams to work in fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making and public safety. That work is neither hypothetical nor imported. StarApple AI models sit inside Caribbean financial institutions catching fraud in real time, and the company's Section 9 AI Lab runs financial crime, criminal network and national security AI for regional partners including Crime Stop Jamaica.

The through line UWI honoured is that of Caribbean AI, built by Caribbean scientists, on Caribbean problems, at a scale most of the region was told to expect only from outside. That is the case the Association has made in every regional forum since its founding, and it is the case the citation now underwrites.

In His Own Words

"this is an honour I was not expecting, UWI was the environment where I learned to learn, at the time I did not realise they were also building up the skills I needed to excel as an Entrepreneur and Business owner"

Adrian's connection to Mona did not end at graduation. He continues to work with the Climate Studies Group Mona in the UWI Physics Department, building AI world models with a group of physicists whose research reaches directly into the region's hurricane and climate resilience picture. That is the same instinct the Association tries to institutionalise at regional level: keep the researchers here, keep the capital here, keep the models here, and keep the problems being solved here rather than being shipped off for someone else to name.

Why This Recognition Matters to the Association

The Caribbean AI Association exists to give 17-plus Caribbean nations a coordinated voice on AI governance, ethics and innovation, and to close the gap between regional AI ambition and regional AI capacity. A CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence award, presented by UWI Mona's Faculty of Science and Technology, is one of the region's own institutions naming a Caribbean AI practitioner as the standard rather than the exception. That distinction matters to how the region argues its position at every next AI conversation it enters, from procurement rooms to policy tables.

Adrian holds two other roles that shape how the Association reads this award. He is Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, the region's dedicated AI risk governance body, and he runs The Genius Project, the youth AI programme that in its third year has trained more than 200 Caribbean children and teenagers between the ages of 6 and 18, with a parallel track for parents on safe use and misinformation. Institutional building, risk governance and youth capacity are three of the four sides of the Caribbean AI position the Association argues for. UWI honouring the person doing all three of them, in one region, is a signal the Association intends to carry into the next round of policy work.

The Prior Record

The Rising Star citation lands on top of a decade of regional recognition. Adrian was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica Start Up 2024 and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year, and his AI infrastructure work is supported by AWS and NVIDIA. He is an AI mentor to Caribbean and Latin American entrepreneurs, in a region whose AI mentor pool has historically been thin. Each of those items is on the record; taken together they describe a career that has been building the plumbing under Caribbean AI, quietly, for long enough that a Faculty citation now reads as belated rather than early.

What the Association Says

The Caribbean AI Association congratulates Adrian on the award, and thanks the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona for naming this work as a Caribbean achievement rather than a personal one. It is a Caribbean achievement in the strict sense: the company is Caribbean, the models are Caribbean, the fraud they catch and the classrooms they teach are Caribbean, and the risk they help govern is Caribbean. That is the Association's mandate in miniature, and it is the argument the Association will keep making at every regional table this recognition now helps open.

Related Reading Across the Caribbean AI Network

• StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company
• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, chaired by Adrian Dunkley
• The Genius Project, training Caribbean youth in AI
• Adrian Dunkley