UWI Mona Awards Our Founder Adrian Dunkley the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award

The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona, has awarded our founder Adrian Dunkley the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award, citing him for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean. For a lab whose central promise is that the region can train, enable and build its own AI, having that argument affirmed by the region's flagship university carries a specific weight.

Recognition rooted in an applied record

Adrian is a physicist, entrepreneur and AI scientist with fifteen years of applied AI practice. He founded StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, and has led the design of AI systems operating in fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making and public safety. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association, Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year, and in 2024 he received EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica, start-up category. His work is supported by AWS and NVIDIA programmes, and he mentors AI entrepreneurs across the Caribbean and Latin America.

He also advises Crime Stop Jamaica on AI, and directs the Section 9 AI Lab, whose research covers financial crime, criminal networks and national security. That range, from a payments risk model to a climate world model to a national security research project, is why the citation talks about pioneering work in solutions rather than a single product.

Why this reads as an enablement story

Adrian has long argued that school is misunderstood as a paper credential for a job interview, when the more useful frame is that a good university is a compressed apprenticeship: a time machine that shortens the distance between where a person is and where they can plausibly get to. The award, arriving from the institution he trained at, is a live example of that argument, and it is the reason our engagements are structured the way they are.

Our board-level and executive AI training starts from the same premise. A team cannot deploy what its leaders cannot evaluate, so we invest in raising the literacy of the people who authorise the work, not only the people who build it. The StarApple AI board-level AI training study we published earlier this year measured what happens next: organisation-wide AI literacy rose from 2.0 to 3.7 out of 5, board data literacy from 1.8 to 4 out of 5, and governance stood up in six months instead of eleven to fifteen. Recognition of the founder by an academic peer group is a signal that the underlying methodology is durable enough to be examined and named, not a marketing artefact.

The pipeline the award sits on top of

Adrian's non-profit, The Genius Project, is now in its third year and has trained more than 200 Caribbean youth aged 6 to 18. That is not a corporate social responsibility side note. It is the front end of the talent pipeline the region needs if applied AI is to remain a Caribbean industry rather than an imported one, and it is the pool that maestro's engineering teams, IMPACT AI Lab and Section 9 AI Lab hire from as those young people mature. An award to the founder from UWI closes a loop that begins at age six.

The climate work sits at the university

The most consequential piece of research on Adrian's desk right now is a collaboration with the Climate Studies Group Mona and the UWI Physics Department: AI world models built to serve hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture and disaster planning. The team is aiming past today's better-than-baseline forecasts toward systems that can place a storm's landfall precisely enough to shape a real evacuation, and read the onset of a flash drought weeks earlier than current tools allow. That research does not belong to the lab. It belongs to a partnership with the university that produced the founder, which is exactly where the citation puts it.

What this means for clients

• Training that has been vetted. Boards and executive teams considering our AI enablement engagements are working with a curriculum whose author has now been formally recognised by the region's leading science and technology faculty.
• Applied research access. maestro clients working on climate risk, financial crime and financial inclusion draw on a research programme that is embedded in UWI Mona, not one that sits at arm's length from it.
• A durable regional bench. Every deployment we run is staffed in part by researchers who came through The Genius Project, the IMPACT AI Lab or a UWI internship. The award is a public marker that this pipeline is producing serious work.