UWI Mona Honours Our Founder: Adrian Dunkley Wins the 2026 CIBC Rising Star Award

The Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona has named Adrian H. Dunkley as the 2026 recipient of the CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award. Adrian is the founder of StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, and the founder of StarApple Analytics, the analytics arm of that company. The Faculty's citation reads, in its own words, "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean."

For a data and analytics business, this recognition lands squarely on the thesis we serve every day. Applied AI for a Caribbean bank is a different problem to applied AI for a G7 bank. Fraud in a Jamaican payment stream has its own patterns. Financial inclusion in a country where a meaningful share of adults sits outside the formal system is a different modelling problem to credit scoring in a market where everyone already has a file. Operational decisions inside a regulated Caribbean industry have to hold up under a regulator that is sitting in the same market, not one across an ocean. The Faculty's citation, in effect, endorses the case for building that capability in the region rather than outsourcing it.

What the Analytics Business Runs On

StarApple Analytics was built to answer a specific question for Caribbean organisations: what would you do differently tomorrow if the data you already own were actually being used? The engagements we take on tend to concentrate in a handful of areas that map directly to the citation's language.

Fraud detection. Fraud analytics only work if the models are trained on local behaviour. Card-not-present fraud in Kingston does not look identical to card-not-present fraud in London. Adrian's applied AI work at StarApple has been in production against Caribbean transaction data for years, which is what a fraud model needs before it earns the right to make decisions on real payments.

Financial inclusion. Building AI that reaches the unbanked and underbanked is a modelling problem before it is a marketing problem. It requires features that most global credit-scoring systems do not have. StarApple's earlier AI work included proprietary models that helped distribute relief at scale during COVID-19, exactly the class of high-stakes, low-margin-for-error inclusion work that most vendors will not touch.

Operational decision-making. This is where analytics stops being a report and starts being a decision. Which loans to approve, which claims to fast-track, which customers to prioritise on a bad-weather day, which routes to keep open when capacity is short. The value shows up in the P&L, not the deck.

Public safety. Adrian also runs Section 9 AI Lab, which researches financial crime, criminal networks and national security. The methods and datasets that make crime and financial-crime analytics work overlap heavily with the methods that make commercial fraud analytics work. That crossover is one of the reasons a Caribbean analytics team is well placed to serve both.

Why the Physics Background Matters to Analytics Clients

The Faculty of Science and Technology recognising a physicist for AI work is not incidental. Physics teaches you to build models of systems you can only partly observe, and to be honest about what your model does not know. That is exactly the discipline analytics clients pay for when the stakes are real. Adrian's research work with the Climate Studies Group Mona at the UWI Physics Department is a live example: AI world models aimed at hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture and disaster planning. In his own words, the ambition of that programme goes beyond predicting whether a hurricane is coming. It aims to predict where it will hit and how strong it will be, with the goal of cutting the number of lives lost.

That is the same intellectual habit we apply to a Caribbean insurer's claim data, a bank's risk portfolio, or a national telecom's churn model: model the system as it actually behaves, quantify the uncertainty, and let the client make a better-informed decision than yesterday. The Rising Star Award recognises that habit at the founder level. StarApple Analytics is the place where that habit is turned into deliverables.

The Wider Record

Adrian is a physicist, entrepreneur and AI scientist with 15 years of applied AI experience. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), the two regional bodies carrying the collective voice of Caribbean AI on strategy, governance and safety. Through The Genius Project he has trained over 200 Caribbean youth aged 6 to 18 in three years, seeding a next generation of analysts and engineers. AWS and NVIDIA have supported the company, and he mentors AI founders across the Caribbean and Latin America. The Rising Star Award follows his 2024 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica win in the Start-Up category and the Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year award.

On the recognition itself, Adrian pointed the credit at the university that trained him, saying it was an honour he had not expected, and that UWI had been the environment where he learned how to learn. That skill, he noted, was what he later needed to build a company. For an analytics practice, that is not a bad summary of the work: the technical training gets you into the room, and the discipline of learning is what keeps you useful once you are in it.

What This Means for Analytics Clients

None of the day-to-day work at StarApple Analytics changes because of an award. Our engagements still start with a data audit, still centre on decisions with money attached, and still ship models we can defend to a board. What does change is the institutional weight behind the argument we have been making since the company was founded: that applied AI built by Caribbean people for Caribbean problems is worth taking seriously, and that a Jamaican university at the calibre of UWI Mona is now saying so out loud.

Congratulations, Adrian, from all of us at StarApple Analytics.