UWI Names Adrian Dunkley a 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star

TLDR

• The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona, has awarded Adrian Dunkley the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award. The citation reads: "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean."
• Dunkley is a physicist, entrepreneur and AI scientist with fifteen years of applied AI work. He founded StarApple AI, the first AI company in the Caribbean, and 14West, the region's first AI startup accelerator and grant fund.
• He serves as President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC). Application domains across his ventures include fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making and public safety.
• The award follows EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica (Start-Up, 2024) and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year, and follows the Rising Star's climate research at the Climate Studies Group Mona on AI world models for hurricane prediction and drought forecasting.
• For 14West, a university stamp on the founder's operating record is a data point on the fund's thesis: Caribbean AI companies, backed early, built by people trained here, are worth building.

The Award

The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies, Mona, has named Adrian Dunkley, founder of 14West and StarApple AI, a recipient of the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star Award. The full citation reads: "for pioneering work in artificial intelligence to provide solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean."

The CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Awards are the Faculty's principal recognition of graduates whose work is reshaping the region. The Rising Star Award is directed specifically at alumni whose contribution has already begun to define a field, and is expected to continue doing so.

The Record Behind the Citation

Dunkley is a physicist, entrepreneur and AI scientist. Fifteen years of applied AI work sit behind the award. That work has grown from a single company into a regional stack of ventures, research groups and institutions.

The anchor remains StarApple AI, the first AI company founded in the Caribbean. Its models are in production across fraud detection, financial inclusion, operational decision-making and public safety. Those are the domains where poor decisions cost the region the most money, and, in the case of public safety, the most lives. The company has kept the same discipline from day one: build in the Caribbean, for the Caribbean, on data that lives here.

Alongside the ventures, Dunkley runs The Genius Project, a nonprofit now in its third year. The programme has trained over 200 Caribbean youth aged 6 to 18 in artificial intelligence, from first principles through to functional builds. In a region where AI is only now entering formal schooling, a three-year, 200-plus pipeline of teenagers who ship real models is a piece of talent infrastructure that will matter for decades.

He serves as President of the Caribbean AI Association, the regional body for AI practitioners across CARICOM, and as Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), the body focused on how AI is governed and deployed responsibly across the region. Beyond those chairs he supports Crime Stop Jamaica and runs the Section 9 AI Lab, a practical research group focused on financial crime, criminal networks and national security. Section 9 targets the AI risks that Caribbean deployments actually face, rather than the frontier-scale scenarios that dominate the wider AI safety conversation.

The research thread now carrying the most weight is climate. Dunkley works with the Climate Studies Group Mona at the UWI Physics Department on AI world models for the Caribbean: systems that learn how regional environments behave, so that hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture planning and disaster response can be improved before the storm arrives rather than after it lands. Jamaica sits on the front line of Atlantic hurricane risk, and a research programme that can meaningfully improve landfall accuracy is exactly the kind of AI application the citation is pointing at.

Prior recognition tracks the same work. Dunkley was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica in the Start-Up category in 2024, and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year. He has been supported by AWS and NVIDIA through their programmes for AI companies, and serves as an AI mentor to Caribbean and Latin American entrepreneurs.

What This Says About the 14West Thesis

14West was built on one operating thesis: Caribbean AI companies, funded early and non-dilutively, staffed by people trained in the region, will outperform imported alternatives on the region's own problems. The fund deploys US$1M in non-dilutive grant capital across 14 Caribbean AI startups, one per nation, across finance, health, climate, education, culture and AI infrastructure.

An award from the university that trained the fund's founder is not, by itself, a market outcome. It is corroboration. The people who taught Dunkley, and who watched fifteen years of subsequent work, are willing to put an institutional stamp on the direction. That is the same direction the fund is asking Caribbean founders to build in, and the same direction Caribbean investors and partners are increasingly willing to back.

Two threads of the citation matter especially for 14West. The first is the phrase "solutions for Jamaica and the Caribbean". The award recognises applied AI that solves the region's problems, not AI that generates papers or press. That is the same test 14West applies to grant recipients. The second is the presence of climate, financial inclusion and public safety in Dunkley's own portfolio. Three of the fund's six sectors are already inside the citation.

Dunkley on the Award

Speaking on the recognition, Dunkley credited the environment that produced the operating skills the award is now recognising:

"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"

On the climate work at Mona, he set out where the research is heading:

"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"

What Comes Next

None of the underlying work pauses for the award. StarApple AI, 14West, the Caribbean AI Association, CAIRMC, Section 9, The Genius Project and the climate research at Mona are all live projects with a working next step. The 2026 cohort of 14West grant recipients is being assembled from the same regional talent pool the citation points to. Applications remain open at 14westai.com/apply.

For Caribbean founders, the practical part is this: a university, a fund and a growing set of operating institutions are now backing Caribbean-built AI companies with money and mentorship, not just praise. 14West reviews applications on a rolling basis, so a founder with a specific user and a specific problem does not need to wait for a fixed deadline to apply.

Further reading: Adrian Dunkley · StarApple AI · Caribbean AI Association · Caribbean AI Risk Management Council

About 14West

14West is the Caribbean's first AI startup accelerator and grant fund, founded by Adrian Dunkley, the 2026 CIBC Caribbean Alumni Excellence Rising Star and founder of StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first artificial intelligence company. 14West deploys US$1M in non-dilutive grant capital across 14 Caribbean AI startups, one per nation. Apply at 14westai.com/apply.