Remarkable Speakers. Remarkable Weekend.

Commencement signifies the culmination of years of hard work, growth and achievement for Gonzaga students. The speakers for our 2026 Undergraduate and Graduate ceremonies exemplify this. Get to know them below, then click through for the full stories.

Coach Fortier’s Advice for Hard Seasons: Keep Going. You Can Do This.

For more than a decade, Lisa Fortier has lived inside those moments. She has built one of the most successful programs in women’s college basketball. Players describe her as a balance of demanding and deeply caring, competitive and grounded. Spokane knows her well as the coach pacing the sideline in the Kennel who they might also bump into at their local Costco.

This year, on Mother’s Day morning inside the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, Coach Fortier will stand at the commencement podium as someone who has spent the last year learning what it means to stay steady when life changes without warning.

“You Guys Are the Ones to Change the World”

Laughter echoed down the halls of the UW-GU Health Partnership Building early Friday as a small cohort of Gonzaga faculty, administrators and alumni from the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Health Sciences – joined by partners from University of Washington School of Medicine – convened for coffee, pastry and community.

Unsuspecting students walking by might have mistaken the gathering for yet another year-end celebration. But this collection of scholars and researchers was actually a welcoming party of sorts for Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, a surgical oncologist and cancer researcher who also served as director of the National Institutes of Health and of the National Cancer Institute. She traveled to Spokane from Boston late Thursday in anticipation of receiving an honorary Doctor of Science degree and speaking at the Gonzaga Graduate Commencement ceremony Saturday.