The University of Lagos will hold its 14th Inaugural Lecture of the 2025/2026 Academic Session on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, with the event scheduled for 4:00 p.m. at the J. F. Ade. Ajayi (Main) Auditorium, UNILAG. Guests are expected to be seated by 3:45 p.m.
Professor Peter Olabisi Oluseyi of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, will deliver the lecture, titled That We May Have Light, with Vice-Chancellor Professor Folasade Ogunsola, OON, FAS, presiding. The lecture comes as the university continues to place itself at the center of conversations about technology, research and the next phase of student training.
That broader push was visible on April 30, 2026, when a delegation from the Nigeria Computer Society Lagos Chapter visited the university for talks on closer collaboration between academia and industry. Dr. Adewale Adesina led the delegation, while Professor Foluso Lesi represented Ogunsola at the meeting, which focused on preparing students for a technology landscape changing rapidly.
The proposals discussed went beyond general cooperation. They included structured onboarding of students into the professional body from their first year, mentorship programmes, innovation-focused collaborations, startup incubation pathways, digital capacity building initiatives, AI research partnerships and greater participation in conferences and industry engagements. Two student representatives from the Faculty of Computing and Informatics, Toluwani Ajibare and Jerry Chukwuma Aneke, also spoke during the meeting.
The timing matters because the discussion came shortly after UNILAG launched the Artificial Intelligence University Innovation Pod, sharpening the university’s effort to narrow the gap between classroom learning and the digital economy. For an institution that describes itself as having been established more than six decades ago and as research-oriented, the sequence of events signals a deliberate move to tie academic work to the demands of AI, automation, cybersecurity, cloud computing and digital finance. The question now is not whether the university is moving in that direction. It is how quickly those ideas turn into training, research and opportunities students can use while they are still on campus.
