Presenting the Class of 2026!
Submitted on June 23, 2026
FOUNDED IN 1829, GEORGETOWN COLLEGE ENTERS ITS 197TH YEAR, CELEBRATING 294 UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE DEGREE RECIPIENTS.
By Bethany H. Langdon ‘93, Senior Vice President for Communications and Marketing, Special Advisor to the President
At the Senior Picnic on Thursday, May 14, Dr. Abraham Prades began the senior celebration with the Faculty Charge, encouraging students to listen to others, be someone people trust, and contribute to the world in a meaningful way.
At the John L. Hill Chapel on Friday, May 15, at 7 p.m., students, faculty, staff, and families gathered for Baccalaureate, a time of worship and encouragement led by Rev. Dr. Kevin Gardner-Sinclair, Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Louisville. Senior Portia Witten received the Norman and Martha Yocum Lytle
Christian Service Award.
Dr. De Kai gave the commencement address on Saturday, May 16 at 10 a.m. in
Davis-Reid Alumni Gym. De Kai is the author of the award-winning book Raising Al, and recently founded the Empathetic AI Institute. He is a pioneering AI professor
who built the web’s first global AI translator by inventing radical new language models, laying the groundwork for tools like Google Translate and Bing Translator.
De Kai was honored by the Association for Computational Linguistics as a Founding Fellow for his decades of breakthroughs, which lie at the intersection of language, AI, cognition, and ethics. De Kai is at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong) and the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley), served on Google’s inaugural AI ethics advisory council, and is Independent Director at the AI ethics think tank The Future Society.
De Kai expressed deep gratitude to Georgetown College for giving his late father, theoretical physicist and university president Dr. Chia-Wei Woo, the liberal arts education that set him on a storied career dedicated to education, peace, and humanitarianism. He fiercely championed the liberal arts ideals that have rippled through to De Kai’s own work. Woo graduated from Georgetown College in 1956, received an honorary doctoral degree from GC in 1995, and was inducted into the GC Hall of Fame in 2024.
The Class of 2026 selected Rita Cerdeira Guerra Gonçalves to give the Senior Address. She majored in biomedical sciences with a minor in psychology. Originally from Porto, Portugal, she was a member of the Women’s Volleyball Team as well as Tri-Beta and Gamma Sigma Epsilon Honor Societies. Cerdeira plans to pursue a Doctor of Medicine degree and become a neurosurgeon.
This year’s President’s Award, selected by Rosemary Allen, was presented to Jada ‘Jade’ Bivens. President Allen shared, “I have never seen anyone with such an extraordinary combination of creative vision and the grit to turn vision into reality, exemplified by her formation of the Style Society and the launching of the ‘Rework the Runway’ fashion show in the spring of her sophomore year. Working with and empowering others, she built this into a GC tradition that has the power to endure.” Bivens is an Oxford and Bishop Scholar, majoring in psychology. She is from Louisville, Kentucky.
Haylee Stansbury, a double major in mathematics and secondary education with a minor in communications and media studies, is from Nicholasville, Kentucky, and was a member of the Softball Team and Kappa Delta sorority. She will teach mathematics at West Jessamine High School after graduation. Stansbury presented the senior class gift, which totaled $4652.11.
James Graham Brown Professor of Business Administration and Economics
Dr. Tom Cooper received the Don and Chris Kerr Cawthorne Award for Excellence in Teaching. Cooper was recognized for his twenty-seven years on the faculty and for being an exceptionally approachable and extraordinarily skilled educator.
Georgetown College awarded 223 undergraduate degrees and 71 graduate degrees. Our newest alumni are ready to embark on a future course of impact and meaning.
For Commencement images, visit our Flickr Album: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCVrAQ
