Hinds, Tannis, Hickling among 14 to get honorary degrees from UWI

The Caribbean Soca Queen, a leading business executive and a biochemist will next month be recognised and honoured by the University of the West Indies (UWI) for their outstanding contributions to Barbados.

Alison Hinds, Trisha Tannis and Ian Hickling – named among the 14 eminent persons to be conferred honorary degrees by the UWI – will officially receive their new titles during the UWI Cave Hill Campus graduation ceremony on October 21.

The annual tradition of conferring honorary degrees coincides this year with the UWI’s 75th jubilee celebrations. 

Hinds, born and raised in England until the age of 11, moved to Barbados where she found her love of Caribbean music like calypso and reggae. 

At the age of 17, she became a lead vocalist for the band Square One which won multiple awards for hits like Ragamuffin, Aye Aye Aye and Faluma. After forming her band, her most successful international song, Roll It Gal, peaked at #52 on the Billboard R&B charts in 2006. The song has featured in many Hollywood productions, such as Grey’s Anatomy.

Hinds is an acknowledged trailblazer for women in the industry and in 2014, she was appointed Caribbean International Federation of Business and Professional Women Goodwill Ambassador. 

In 2018, she received the designation Barbados Cultural Ambassador from then Prime Minister Freundel Stuart and joined Rihanna as the only women to be so designated. Also in that year, the Mayor of Brooklyn recognised her outstanding career and service to the Caribbean community.

When she is not performing, Hinds is an advocate for such causes as AIDS awareness, women’s rights, diabetes, and cancer foundations, as well as organisations for disabled and physically challenged children.

Tannis is another woman who has made her mark. The experienced strategic finance professional is the Managing Director of the Unicomer (Barbados) Group – the first woman appointed to that office within the Unicomer Caribbean and Latin America Group.

A UWI alumna, she holds a BSc (Hons) degree in accounting and is professionally qualified as a Chartered Professional Accountant of Canada. She is also a Fellow of the Chartered Governance Institute of Canada and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados.

Elected unopposed to serve as President of the Barbados Chamber of Commerce in May 2019, Tannis ably steered the organisation and worked with the Government of Barbados during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown. In 2021, she became the first woman to chair the Barbados Private Sector Association. Under her leadership, the association worked with the Government to stabilise the cost of basic food items and stave off the inflationary effects of the war in Ukraine and the global supply chain.

As a strategic partner of the Cave Hill Campus strategy to drive entrepreneurship and innovation, Tannis strengthened private sector engagement and co-organised the inaugural UWI Private Sector Forum and Business Management Think Tank in 2022.

Although not born here, Hickling, a New Zealander who came to Barbados via Eritrea and Nepal, has made a significant contribution to this island.  The holder of a BSc in Cell Biology and Biochemistry as well as an MSc in Biochemistry from the University of Auckland, he opened and still leads a commercial medical device factory with an employee team of 260 that develops and manufactures intraocular lenses.

Twenty-six years on, Lenstec is one of the leading export manufacturers in Barbados, with manufacturing technologies and processes designed and built in-house by Lenstec’s engineering staff, many of whom are graduates of The UWI.

Its proprietary lens manufacturing technologies, including micro-precision lathes, mills, polishing equipment, and moulds, enable the company to produce premium lenses with reduced variability to help improve surgical predictability. Currently, more intraocular lenses are made with Lenstec technology worldwide than any other systems.

As Lenstec’s president, Hickling was invited by Export Barbados to serve on the Life Sciences Oversight Committee to oversee the development of a life sciences industry in the country, under the Bio-Island initiative to develop Barbados as a biotechnology hub in the region, exporting to the world. 

(BT/PR)