- The Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona has named Adrian Dunkley a 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star.
- The citation recognises pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean.
- 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 now leads Maestro AI Labs.
- His applied research covers fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making and public safety.
- Alongside the day job, he chairs CAIRMC, presides over the Caribbean AI Association, and runs The Genius Project, which has trained more than 200 Caribbean youth aged 6 to 18.
We are proud to share that Adrian Dunkley, founder of Maestro AI Labs and of the wider StarApple AI network, has been named a recipient of the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award by the Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona. The citation reads: for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean.
The award is the region's most senior recognition of alumni whose work has reshaped their field. For a research and product lab based in Kingston, having our founder recognised by the university that trained him is a validation of an argument we make in every engagement: that world-class applied AI can be built from the Caribbean, for the Caribbean, and does not require permission from elsewhere.
The record behind the citation
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 built AI systems that operate in the parts of the economy that matter most: fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making, and public safety. Those are not demo domains. They are places where a wrong answer has a cost that shows up in someone's life.
Beyond the products, Adrian carries the coordinating roles that a young field in a small region needs someone to hold. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC). He advises Crime Stop Jamaica on the application of AI to serious crime, and he leads the Section 9 AI Lab, whose research covers financial crime, criminal networks and national security. Prior recognition includes EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica, start-up category, in 2024, and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year. His work has been supported by AWS and NVIDIA, and he mentors AI entrepreneurs across the Caribbean and Latin America.
Why UWI matters to the work
Asked for his reaction, Adrian was characteristically direct. In his own words, the honour came as a surprise, and the debt he feels to the university is not narrowly academic. UWI, he says, was the environment where he learned to learn, and only in hindsight did he recognise that the same environment was quietly building the skills he would later need as an entrepreneur and business owner. He has argued for years that the education system in the region is too often reduced to a paper certificate for a job interview, when the more honest description is that a good university is a compressed apprenticeship in judgement under uncertainty, a way of shortening the distance between where a person is and where they can plausibly get to.
That view runs through how Maestro AI Labs is organised. The lab hires and mentors early-career Caribbean researchers, collaborates directly with UWI faculty, and treats every commercial engagement as an opportunity to widen the region's applied AI bench.
The climate work is now inside a university partnership
The most consequential piece of the current research programme sits in Adrian's collaboration with the Climate Studies Group Mona and the UWI Physics Department. The team is building AI world models designed to serve hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture and disaster planning. World models learn how an environment behaves rather than only describing what has already happened, which is exactly the class of model a chain of small island states needs when the physics of its weather does not fit the datasets trained on temperate continents.
On what that work is for, Adrian is unambiguous:
"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"
That is a research goal with an operational endpoint. If the region can shorten the interval between detection and confident geographic forecast for a hurricane, or read the onset of a flash drought weeks earlier than the current systems allow, the payoff is measured in evacuations that happen in time and harvests that are not lost. It is the reason a lab funds research that will not ship as a product for years.
What this means for Maestro AI Labs
For the lab's clients and partners, the practical implications are straightforward.
- Applied research capacity is real, and it is regional. The award is recognition from the region's flagship university of a body of work whose home base is Kingston. Enterprises that want serious AI built for Caribbean data, Caribbean regulation and Caribbean risk do not need to source the capability abroad.
- The enablement pipeline is expanding. 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. The lab hires from that talent base, and the deployments it runs give the trained researchers real production experience.
- Governance is not an afterthought. Adrian's roles at CAIRMC and the Caribbean AI Association ensure that the risk questions arrive with the technology, not after it.
Congratulations, and thanks
Our thanks go to the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona, to CIBC Caribbean for the sponsorship, and to the wider Maestro AI Labs, StarApple AI, CAIRMC, Caribbean AI Association and Genius Project communities whose work is reflected in the award. The recognition belongs to the founder. The work continues.