2026 Commencement and Baccalaureate Speakers
Submitted on April 30, 2026
Georgetown College’s 2026 Commencement will be held on Saturday, May 16, at 10:00 AM on Giddings Lawn. Doors open at 8:30 AM. The decision to move the ceremony indoors due to inclement weather will be announced by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 14, via email to students.
COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER: De Kai
De Kai is the author of the award-winning book Raising AI, which MIT Press will release in paperback in June 2026, 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 ACL 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 and the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley), served on Google’s inaugural AI ethics advisory council, and is an Independent Director at the AI ethics think tank The Future Society.
Georgetown College’s 2026 Baccalaureate Ceremony will be held on Friday, May 15, at 7:00 PM in the John L. Hill Chapel.
BACCALAUREATE SPEAKER: Rev. Dr. Kevin Gardner-Sinclair
Kevin is the Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Louisville. Kevin completed his undergraduate work in Biblical Studies and History at Hardin-Simmons University, a Master of Divinity at Wake Forest School of Divinity, and a Doctor of Ministry at Baylor University. He is the proud parent of Hank (5) and Rex (2) and is married to Nora Gardner-Sinclair, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and trauma therapist from Houston. He served for 11 years in Youth Ministry prior to moving to Kentucky, including 8 years in midtown Houston at South Main Baptist Church as Minister of Youth / Missions. While there, he helped found Sodzo International, an evidence-based program and rescue farm for street-affected children in rural Kenya, and he led the Manna Ministry, an active ministry among his neighbors living on the streets.
