Alexander Tsiaras

The son of Greek immigrants who emigrated via Ellis Island to the US after the conclusion of the Second World War, Tsiaras was raised on the stories of his parents’ homeland. His father would seasonally bring the goats south from Northern Macedonia to a small village near Mount Olympus where he met Tsiaras’ mother.

At the age of 19, Tsiaras travelled to his parents' villages in rural Greece to spend a year herding goats. It was here that he was exposed to the extraordinary centuries-old funeral and exhumation rituals that inspired him to record the local practices and independently kickstart his journalism career. Tsiaras co-authored his first book, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton University Press), in 1972.[3]

“Greeks don’t celebrate life, they celebrate death,” according to Tsiaras. “We don’t celebrate birthdays, we celebrate name days, based on the deaths of saints.

“In these remote Greek villages, they believe that the soul's transcendence to heaven is directly related to the decomposition of the flesh: the more flesh on the bones exposed at the time of the exhumation, the more sins; the less flesh, the less sins,” he added.

In the early 1980s, Tsiaras’ work in Greece attracted the attention of the German/US monthly magazine, Geo, who assigned him to travel to his parents' villages to document them through photography. These works, “My Father’s Greece”, were published in Geo in 1982. Geo later collaborated with Tsiaras to help them launch as an international presence using his visual prowess.

After his work abroad, Tsiaras returned to the United States and studied painting and sculpting with the well-known artist Lucas Samaras and sculptor George Segal, but it was the drama of medical intervention that gripped him most. Photographing and documenting the marvel of surgical operations became a point of increasing focus.

Tsiaras’ next move was to teach himself mathematics and physics, and he used this knowledge to start developing his own lenses, including one for a microscope that was used to photograph the first images of human eggs in an in vitro fertilization program. Another lens, designed for use with an endoscope, is capable of photographing a fetus from outside the amniotic sac. Images developed using this lens became cover stories for Life Magazine.[1]

In 1989, Tsiaras realized the potential of computer-generated imagery and learned UNIX, then C and C++ to write his own programs that transferred his knowledge of light moving through physical space to light moving through tissue in virtual space.[1]

Tsiaras formed part of an innovative team that designed 3D imaging technologies capable of analyzing the density of tissues, the results of which could then be extrapolated and segmented to perform surgical operations in advance. They received grants from major groups such as Intel and Apple to further their technology.

“Before this software, [surgeons] would sometimes have to perform the operation maybe four times in order to get it right,” said Tsiaras. “But this way, you can do the measurements in advance and achieve it in one go.”

By the 1990s, Tsiaras’ work had gotten him noticed by many media groups, which led to appearances and contributions to various books, magazine covers, and CD-ROMs. One publication of Life magazine dedicated the entire issue to Tsiaras’ visualization of the human body, which was unprecedented for the magazine since they had never before focused on only a single contributor for an issue.

Despite having never formally completed any higher-level education, he was approached by Yale School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, with an offer to become an adjunct professor. Working with Yale, he received funding from NASA to write algorithms for virtual surgery so that astronauts could be surgically treated in robotics pods during deep space flights.

As Tsiaras explained, “…if you’re on your way to Mars and when passing by the moon you get an appendicitis attack, you’re going to have to be cut”.

Tsiaras has fused his experience in art, science, technology, journalism, and storytelling to develop groundbreaking medical tech companies.

Beginning in 1988 as Anatomical Travelogue, Tsiaras remolded the company into the more user-friendly TheVisualMD in 1997. A media and technology company based in New York, TheVisualMD was dedicated to writing advanced software that scans the body from the molecular to the larger anatomies, from conception to advanced age.[4]

Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Conferences, described TheVisualMD as “…the perfect marriage of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Pixar.”

In 2017, Tsiaras launched a new personalized health platform, StoryMD. This single, unified platform translates user health and wellness data into a visually rich story, allowing users to understand, track, share, and act on the trajectory of their well-being. Using unparalleled visualizations and a library of authoritative health information, StoryMD empowers users to actively understand and manage their health at each stage of the journey.

StoryMD has collated one of the world’s most complete digital repositories of medical knowledge. The encyclopedic domain boasts over 5,000 health and wellness topics and 35,000 articles, delivered in a highly accessible format that emphasizes relevance to the user. All the information therein has been vetted by authoritative and reliable open sources including the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.[5]

Augmenting this library is a multimedia trove encompassing over 50,000 videos and 75,000 images and interactive tools that detail scientific intricacies in painstaking visual detail.[5]

Emulating Tsiaras’ multidisciplinary background, the StoryMD team marries artist and logician under one umbrella. The collection of scientists, mathematicians, visual designers, programmers, writers, and editors synthesize their work to capture both the aesthetic and technical splendor of medical science.

Mr. Tsiaras lives with his wife, son, and dog Kookla in New York City and in rural Pennsylvania.

• Official website