Father Columba recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and is now Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics 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.
During his time at Georgetown, Fr. Columba has engaged in a variety of activities including research, hospital ethics consultations, teaching, and primary care. 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 served as chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering from 2024 to 2025. 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.