Thursday, August 27, 2026

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• Remembering Waterloo’s first Black professor, Dr. Locksley Edmondson

• The art of tackling a new season: Michael Omoseni in conversation

• Major security weaknesses found in leading open AI models

Remembering Waterloo's first Black professor, Dr. Locksley Edmondson

Dr. Locksley Edmondson, the first Black professor at Waterloo, died on August 18, 2026 in Ithaca, New York, at age 92.

An influential Jamaican scholar whose career spanned over five decades across several countries, Edmondson was a founding faculty member in Waterloo’s Political Science department, joining in 1963. He held masters and doctoral degrees in Political Science from Queen's University (Ontario). His research and teaching specializations included international relations (especially concerning Africa and the Caribbean) and race relations (especially concerning the Black World).

In 1967, Edmondson took a leave of absence from Waterloo to teach in Makerere University in Uganda. He returned to North America in the early 1970s and eventually took up a position at Cornell University, where he became the director of African Studies. Edmondson’s obituary shares that he was “a Pan Africanist firmly committed to the freedom of Black societies worldwide.”

Dr. Christopher Taylor, Associate Vice-President, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism, writes in his 2026 book Unmasking DEI: “The Black faculty members at UW in the 1960s had a large impact not only on the local community, but also on the international community as well."

“Locksley Edmondson was the first Black professor at UW (Glaser, 2017). Although he stayed with the university for a few short years in the Political Science department, he was later the chair of multiple United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) meetings on Caribbean culture and migration. […] Whether (Waterloo’s early Black) professors stayed with UW or left to pursue other interests, they had an immense heart for bettering communities in Canada and their countries of origin.” (Taylor)

Edmondson was featured in the 2021 Waterloo News story, A brief history of Black experience at Waterloo, 1960s -1990s, by Jonathan Zi En Chan, PhD candidate in History.

The art of tackling a new season: Michael Omoseni in conversation

This is an excerpt from an article that was originally on the Athletics website.

By: Cameron Stirrup

One of the province's most renowned linebackers is gearing up for a fourth OUA season with an unlimited ceiling. 

To say Michael Omoseni (Burlington/) is a warrior on the defensive side of the football (no pun intended), is an understatement. A threat to opposing offenses across the OUA last season, his mindset is focused on boosting chemistry with his defensive companions and putting the attack to the Ottawa Gee-Gees' offence ahead of the Warriors' home opener on Saturday. 

"We feel like we can be one of the best defences in the league," Omoseni stated. "The young guys have been picking things up pretty good. That, mixed with the older guys being on the same wavelength and playing well together… I feel good."  

"Ottawa's got my focus. Their running backs, receivers… all of 'em." 

The Burlington native is coming off a 2025 campaign in which he earned OUA first team All-Star honours, and saw his name grace the top five provincially in every tackling category. Across all eight games last season, Omoseni recorded 50 tackles, averaging 6.3 per game. Picking up 11 tackles in week six against the Windsor Lancers, is an effort for opponents to take note of. Omoseni is a player who picks offensive lines apart with ease. 

His work ethic produces results, and those results produce a confidence in lifting his younger teammates up. As Omoseni will always say, he wants the accolades to be a collective effort. 

"It's never just my performance. I have a D-line that always clears things up for me. Guys like Arden Martinez (Niagara Falls/) and Nate Mortenson (Windsor/) are coming in on a lot of those tackles too." 

"If we're able to produce more wins and build on where we're currently at, with more and more guys being in the mix… we can all reach that level together." 

To accompany his All-Star selection last season, Omoseni was named Warriors Defensive Player of the Year by his coaching staff, and selected to the 2026 U SPORTS East-West Bowl – hosted once again by the Warriors – which he did not play in due to injury. 

Despite the setback over the summer, he was still beaming to talk about the whirlwind of that week in May. 

Read the full story.

Major security weaknesses found in leading open AI models

This is an excerpt from an article that was originally on the Waterloo News.

By: Media Relations

Safety protections built into some of the world's most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models can be stripped away with alarming ease, according to a new international study. 

The research team, led by the University of Waterloo and FAR.AI, a non-profit AI security research group, rigorously tested 21 of the most popular open-weight large language models (LLMs) and found they could all be tampered with despite their built-in safeguards. 

The holes in even the best protections currently available raise concerns open-weight models could be used to wage mass disinformation campaigns, create sophisticated email scams or produce step-by-step instructions to make hazardous chemicals. 

“When the safety guardrails are stripped out of a capable model, it can be used at scale for harm in ways a single person could never manage manually,” said Dr. Sirisha Rambhatla, a professor of management science and engineering at Waterloo. 

LLMs are advanced AI systems that can essentially understand and generate human language to perform tasks such as drafting emails, writing computer code and conversing with users. 

Unlike closed proprietary models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, open-weight LLMs are publicly available to be downloaded and fine-tuned for use by everybody from individual software developers to private companies and public organizations like hospitals. 

Rambhatla said the “sobering” results of testing by the team – which included members in Canada, the United States and Switzerland – should serve as a wake-up call to global researchers on the need to develop stronger security systems. 

Read the full story.