UWI Mona has honoured our founder for pioneering AI work in the Caribbean.

We are proud to share that our founder, Adrian Dunkley, 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.

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 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, and the 2024 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Jamaica in the start-up category. Prior recognition includes Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year, and his work is supported by AWS and NVIDIA programmes. He mentors AI entrepreneurs across the Caribbean and Latin America, and directs the Section 9 AI Lab, whose research covers financial crime, criminal networks and national security.

Why an AI award matters to a brand science firm

Orbital Brand Science was founded on a specific claim: that brand decisions get better when the science underneath them is real, and that the region's best brands should not have to import that science from elsewhere. The claim only holds if the science is there. An award to our founder from the region's leading science and technology faculty is direct external evidence that the underlying research programme is serious.

The lab work we lean on runs alongside the brand work rather than after it. Applied AI is what lets us pattern-match across attention data at scale, quantify emotional response in ways that generalise, and pressure-test creative hypotheses against real neural and behavioural signal instead of self-report. When a client asks whether a positioning will hold, or why a piece of communication is being ignored, the honest answer comes out of measurement instruments the founder helped build, not from opinion dressed as strategy.

The Caribbean angle is deliberate

Most of the received wisdom in brand science is trained on North American or European data, and the further a Caribbean brand's audience sits from that training set, the less that wisdom applies. Adrian's applied AI record, across financial inclusion, public safety and operational decision-making, has been built inside Caribbean data and Caribbean constraints. That is the same data our brand science engagements test against, which is why the answers we return generalise inside the region and why we are cautious with off-the-shelf global rules.

The climate research programme is part of the same story. Adrian is collaborating with the Climate Studies Group Mona and the UWI Physics Department to build AI world models aimed at hurricane prediction, drought forecasting, agriculture and disaster planning. It is not brand work, but it is a marker of the kind of research the founder chooses to spend nights on: real-world systems where a wrong answer has a cost that shows up in someone's life.

The founder on what UWI actually gives you

Asked what the award meant to him, Adrian pointed to the university itself and to a view of education he has held for a long time:

I think people get school wrong, it's not a place to get a certificate with your name on it to get a job interview. It is a time machine to success...

That view is the reason the firm is organised around research and training as much as delivery. It is why we publish essays instead of treating our methods as trade secrets. It is why our engagements pair with a client's marketing team rather than replacing them. If a university is a compressed apprenticeship in judgement under uncertainty, a brand science partner should be the same thing at brand scale: an accelerant to the client's own capability, not a permanent dependency.

The community behind the citation

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 programme is one reason the region's next generation of applied AI researchers will not have to leave to build a career in the field, and it is the pool from which our own applied research bench continues to draw. An award to the founder from UWI, in the same season that the third cohort of Genius Project graduates completes the programme, closes a loop that the region has been trying to close for two decades.

Thanks, and what changes on Monday

Thanks to the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI Mona, to CIBC Caribbean for sponsoring the award, and to the clients, collaborators and researchers whose work is reflected in it. On the practical side, nothing changes on Monday. The brief that was on the desk on Friday is still on the desk. The measurement instruments are still being sharpened. The next study is still being designed. That is the point. A serious brand science practice does not celebrate its research reputation, it uses it, quietly, in the next client engagement.