Georgetown University has named its 49th president: Seattle University President Eduardo Peñalver will step down from his post in the other Washington and start his term as head Hoya on July 1.
Peñalver, who was voted in unanimously by Georgetown’s board of directors, has been the president of Seattle University since 2021. The job is close to home for him: He was raised in a small town outside of Tacoma by his mother, a school nurse, and his father, a pediatrician who moved to the US from Cuba in 1962. Though he’s the first nonordained person to lead SU (also a Jesuit school) since its founding in 1891, he tells Georgetown in a press release that his Catholic faith “gives meaning to my work.”
Before taking up the helm in Seattle, Peñalver stepped up as the Dean of Cornell Law School in 2014—making him the first Latino to serve as the dean of an Ivy League law school. He’d earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell, where he met his wife, Seattle University law professor Sital Kalantry. He went on to study philosophy and theology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University before getting his J.D. from Yale Law School. An expert in property and land use law, he taught at Cornell’s law school for several years, as well as at Fordham and the University of Chicago.
This won’t be Peñalver’s first rodeo in DC: He started his career as a clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In a Georgetown University press release, Peñalver says that returning to the District feels like a “full-circle moment,” and he’s looking forward to taking the reins during an “exciting moment in Georgetown’s history,” as the university expands its Capitol Hill campus and hones what he calls its “commitment to finding innovative solutions to society’s most pressing issues.”
Peñalver is taking over for Interim President Robert M. Groves, who has filled the gig since John J. DeGioia stepped down from his 23-year tenure in 2024 after suffering a stroke.
When he’s not reveling in the joys of academia, Peñalver is a pilot—he flew himself and his black lab Griffey from New York to Washington state when he started at Seattle University. He also describes himself as a “coffee snob” and his favorite emoji is the thumbs-up, as it is “very affirming.” He’s also on the record as a paella connoisseur; fortunately, he’ll be able to get his fix right up the road from his new office at Xiquet in Glover Park.
