Father Columba recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and will continue there as Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine. He currently co-leads a multi-site research collaboration on ethics at the end of life, involving clinicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, and Georgetown. A physician specializing in Internal Medicine and a Dominican priest, Fr. Columba attended medical school at Yale and completed residency and chief residency in the Yale Primary Care Program before joining the Dominican Order, a Catholic religious order, in 2016.
Over the past two years at Georgetown, Fr. Columba has engaged in a variety of activities including research, hospital ethics consultations, teaching, and primary care. This year, he completed a master’s degree in Catholic Clinical Ethics, sponsored by Georgetown and the Catholic University of America. For many years, he has worked as a physician moonlighter at Connecticut Hospice. He also has experience as a chaplain in the same institution and presently serves as chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering. His academic publications have appeared in a variety of medical journals (including under his non-religious name, John M Thomas), and his research and clinical interests include geriatrics, end-of-life care, and prognosis. In 2021, he published an annotated translation of the Ars moriendi, "The Art of Dying," through the National Catholic Bioethics Center.