UWI Mona Honours Our Founder: Adrian Dunkley Wins 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 StarApple AI founder Adrian H. Dunkley as the 2026 recipient of the CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award. The citation, in the Faculty's own words, honours him "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean."

For everyone at StarApple AI this is a moment of quiet pride. Adrian is our founder. The company exists because he decided, before there was a Caribbean AI industry to point to, that the region needed its own AI capability built by people who live here and understand the problems. Watching UWI Mona put its name to that view, in the same city where he did his physics, is worth marking.

What the Award Recognises

The CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Awards are given by the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona to alumni whose work has moved a science or technology field forward in a visible, measurable way. The Rising Star Award goes to a graduate whose trajectory and impact stand out early. For 2026, the Faculty has assigned that recognition to a working AI scientist and entrepreneur with 15 years of applied AI experience behind him.

The record the citation points to is specific. Adrian founded StarApple AI as the first AI company established in the Caribbean. From that base, the company has built and deployed applied AI systems for fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making in regulated industries, and public safety. This is not AI as slideware. It is AI in production, running against real transactions, real risk and real consequences, inside Caribbean institutions.

Outside StarApple AI, he runs research and public-good work in parallel. Through Section 9 AI Lab he leads research into financial crime, criminal networks and national security. Through Crime Stop Jamaica he has contributed AI capability to reducing serious crime. Through the Climate Studies Group Mona at the UWI Physics Department, he is building AI world models aimed at hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture and disaster planning, the class of research that a small-island region on the front line of climate risk cannot afford to leave to other people.

"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 Dunkley, Founder and CEO, StarApple AI

The Work the Citation Points To

The phrase "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean" reads plainly, but it covers a lot of ground. Applied AI for Caribbean fraud detection is a different problem to fraud detection in a G7 economy. Financial inclusion built on AI has to reach people the formal banking system routinely misses. Operational decision-making inside a Caribbean regulator or bank has to fit the institutions and the data the region actually has. StarApple AI has spent years doing exactly that work, one deployment at a time.

The talent pipeline sits alongside the deployments. Adrian founded The Genius Project as a non-profit that trains Caribbean youth in AI for social good. Three years in, more than 200 young people aged 6 to 18 have come through the programme. Reaching students in that age band is a deliberate long-horizon bet: the engineers who will run Caribbean AI in 2040 are in primary and secondary school today, and putting the tools in their hands now is how a region grows depth rather than importing it later.

Through the Caribbean AI Association, which Adrian presides over, and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), which he chairs, he leads the two regional bodies that give Caribbean AI a collective voice on strategy and on governance and safety. Global validation of the work has come from AWS and NVIDIA, both of which have supported the company, and he mentors AI founders across the Caribbean and Latin America.

Why UWI Matters to This Company

The link back to UWI Mona is not incidental. Adrian is a physicist by training, and physics is where the habit of building models to explain and predict the world started for him. The Climate Studies Group Mona partnership with the UWI Physics Department is a direct extension of that training into the highest-stakes problem the region faces.

"We are building AI models that will one day do more than predict if a hurricane is coming. It will tell us where it will hit with amazing accuracy, tell us how strong it will be, and most importantly how to stop loss of life."

Adrian Dunkley on the Climate Studies Group Mona partnership

Hurricane Melissa, which struck Jamaica in October 2025, put a very sharp edge on why that research matters. Better prediction is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between families who are moved out in time and families who are not. A UWI-affiliated Caribbean lab, using AI world models trained on the region's own climate, is exactly the kind of infrastructure the Caribbean needs to build for itself.

The Wider Record

The Rising Star Award follows a run of prior recognition. Adrian took the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica title in the Start-Up category in 2024. He has been named Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year. He is a physicist, entrepreneur and AI scientist, and the citation from the Faculty of Science and Technology is, in effect, its own institution weighing in on where that combination has taken him.

For StarApple AI, the recognition is a marker rather than a destination. Being first meant building the company before the ecosystem existed to hold it. Being useful, in the years ahead, means keeping the work honest: AI systems that actually improve fraud outcomes, reach households the banking system misses, help regulators make better decisions, and eventually cut hurricane deaths. That is the standard the citation points at, and that is the standard our founder has set for the company.

Congratulations, Adrian. From all of us at StarApple AI.