UWI Mona Honours 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 Adrian Dunkley a recipient of the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award. The citation credits him for “pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean.” For Trinidad and Tobago, which sits at the centre of Caribbean financial services, energy production, and public sector digital reform, the recognition is a signal worth reading carefully. Regional AI leadership is now being formally recognised by the region's flagship university, and the leader being recognised has built solutions T&T institutions can use today.

Dunkley is a physicist, entrepreneur, and AI scientist with 15 years of applied AI experience. He founded StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, and has taken its work into 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 works with the Climate Studies Group Mona in UWI's Department of Physics on AI world models for hurricane prediction, drought monitoring, agricultural planning, and disaster response.

“This is an honour I was not expecting,” Dunkley said on receiving the award. “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.”

Why This Matters for Trinidad and Tobago

T&T is the financial services capital of the English-speaking Caribbean. Republic Bank, RBC Royal Bank, First Citizens, Guardian Group, Sagicor, and the constellation of insurance and asset management firms centred in Port of Spain have compliance obligations to the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago that grow more demanding every year. Financial crime typologies evolve faster than manual monitoring can keep up with. This is precisely the problem StarApple AI has spent the past five years attacking, and the recognition from UWI is, in effect, a peer-reviewed endorsement of that body of work.

Fraud detection was one of the four applied domains cited by the university. For T&T banks and credit unions, that translates directly into transaction monitoring systems that flag suspicious patterns in real time, know-your-customer processes that verify identity documents at the point of onboarding, and adverse media screening that catches reputational risk before it becomes a regulatory finding. The same modelling discipline underpins financial inclusion, which matters for T&T's credit unions, microfinance lenders, and remittance operators serving customers who cannot easily be scored on traditional credit bureau data alone.

The Energy Sector Angle

The second domain cited in the university's award is operational decision-making. For T&T's energy complex, that is the language of pipeline integrity, plant reliability, gas flaring optimisation, and predictive maintenance across the Point Lisas Industrial Estate and the offshore fields of the Columbus Basin. NGC, Heritage Petroleum, bpTT, and Shell Trinidad already generate more sensor and telemetry data every day than their engineering teams can review by hand. Applied AI that helps operators find the signal in that data, and act on it before an incident becomes a shutdown, is exactly the kind of work Dunkley has been documenting at StarApple AI and through his AWS and NVIDIA partnerships.

The climate work is directly relevant here too. Dunkley described the ambition plainly in a recent statement: “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.” T&T sits south of the main Atlantic hurricane track but is not immune, and the country's energy infrastructure, ports, and coastal communities all depend on the quality of the forecasts that drive shutdown, evacuation, and restart decisions. Better regional models built inside UWI benefit T&T operators the moment they are ready to run.

Digital Government and Public Safety

Public safety was the fourth domain the university named. In Jamaica, that work has taken the form of Crime Stop Jamaica and Section 9 AI Lab, both of which apply AI to reduce violent crime and support law enforcement decision-making. T&T's own crime numbers and the current Ministry of National Security agenda make the same class of tooling relevant here. The country's Ministry of Digital Transformation and iGovTT already run digital identity, e-services, and cybersecurity programmes that would benefit from a formalised AI layer, and there is now a Caribbean-based partner with a Rising Star citation to show he can deliver that layer responsibly.

The regional standard-setting matters too. As Chairman of CAIRMC, Dunkley is one of the people setting how Caribbean institutions should govern AI risk. T&T financial regulators, energy regulators, and public sector CIOs are going to encounter that framework whether they participate in shaping it or not. Active participation is the cheaper option.

A Record That Predates the Award

The Rising Star recognition sits alongside a string of prior honours. Dunkley was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica start-up 2024, and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year. StarApple AI has been supported by AWS and NVIDIA, giving it access to the compute and frameworks used by the largest AI labs in the world. He is an active AI mentor to Caribbean and Latin American entrepreneurs, and the mentorship pipeline he has built is one of the few places in the region where a founder building an AI company can get direct guidance from someone who has already scaled one.

The through-line of all of it is not the individual accolade. It is that the Caribbean now has home-grown AI leadership serious enough to attract formal recognition from its most respected university, and to build institutions that outlast any single project. That is the material fact for T&T decision-makers to work with.

What T&T Institutions Should Do With This

Three concrete steps follow. First, financial services boards and risk committees in T&T should treat the citation as a prompt to review their own AI adoption plans against work already deployed by StarApple AI in comparable Caribbean markets. The learning curve has been paid for elsewhere in the region. Second, energy sector operators at Point Lisas and offshore should map the specific operational decision-making use cases where the productivity gains are largest and start structured pilots rather than open-ended discovery projects. Third, public sector CIOs should engage with CAIRMC's AI risk framework early, so that T&T policy is built inside the Caribbean standard rather than retrofitted to it later.

The Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona has done the region a service by naming this work publicly. T&T's institutions have every reason to act on the signal.

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