Internationally recognized physician Tom Catena to visit Notre Dame

November 3, 2025

Physician, humanitarian, and medical missionary Tom Catena will visit the University of Notre Dame on Nov. 12 (Wednesday) to deliver the 2025 Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C., Lecture at 5 p.m. in the Eck Center Auditorium.

The annual lecture was created in 2009 to highlight justice issues and themes from Catholic social tradition related to human dignity and the common good. Donald Zimmer, MD, emergency medical specialist with Beacon Health System in South Bend, will introduce Catena.

Catena’s lecture, titled “Hope and Healing,” is also part of the 2025–26 Notre Dame Forum, which is organized around the theme “Cultivating Hope.”

The event is free and open to the public.

“Catena embodies the spirit of Fr. Bernie and his ‘theory of enough,’ making him the perfect choice for this year’s lecture,” said Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the Institute for Social Concerns. “Undetered by restrictions on humanitarian aid and working with limited resources in Sudan, Catena has been able to make an outsized impact in a war-torn region that has been largely abandoned by larger Western relief organizations. His work and his story are truly inspiring.”

Tom Catena is an American physician who has been practicing in Gidel in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan since 2008. The region has been an area of active conflict since the mid-1980s, and Catena is the only surgeon for the surrounding population of 750,000 people. Catena credits his Catholic faith for his work and says he is inspired by St. Francis of Assisi. He is known by locals as “Dr. Tom” and is widely respected by the population.

In 2015, Catena was named to the Time 100. In 2017, he was awarded the second annual Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity. And in 2024, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the highest honor the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may confer on an individual. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from Brown University (2016), Yerevan State Medical University (2017), and Duke University (2022).

Catena is chair of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative.

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, Center for Health Sciences Advising, College of Arts and Letters, College of Science, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Department of Africana Studies, Department of Biological Sciences, Department of Theology, Eck Institute for Global Health, Keough School of Global Affairs, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Hillebrand Center for Compassionate Care in Medicine, Pulte Institute for Global Development, and the Office of the President.