Printable Biography of Alexander Tsiaras

Alexander Tsiaras is an internationally renowned technologist, artist, journalist, entrepreneur and author. At the age of 19, Tsiaras returned to his parents' village and spent a year herding 2,000 goats from the Macedonia Albanian boarders down to his mother’s village near the base of Mount Olympus, where he remained to produce his first book, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton University Press). Tsiaras attended Philips Academy and Amherst College only two of the seven schools in which he was thrown out of.

Tsiaras studied painting and sculpting and was apprenticed to artists George Segal and Lucas Samaras. During his years of apprenticeship he trained for the Olympics in the 400 meter run and returned to Greece to compete for the Greek Olympic team until the boycotts of the Moscow Olympics. Tsiaras returned to New York and in order to find medical material to incorporate into his art, he photographed and wrote a story with his brother about new ophthalmic techniques (his brother is the chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Brown University). Tsiaras’ story was published by Life magazine. Life has subsequently produce six covers including an unprecedented entire issue about his work. Along with being an artist and journalist, he has taught himself mathematics and physics and developed 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 was used for the endoscope that can photograph the fetus from outside the amniotic sack. The images resulting from this became cover stories for Life magazine. In 1989, Tsiaras realized the potential of computer generated imaging and learned UNIX , then C and C++ to write his own programs transferring his knowledge of light moving through physical space to light moving through tissue in virtual space. He was offered an adjunct professorship at both Brown and Yale University Medical schools. Working with Yale he received funding from NASA to write algorithms for virtual surgery, so that astronauts could be cut in robotics pods for deep space flights. As an artist and technologist, Tsiaras participated in developing scientific visualization software to enable him to “paint” the human anatomy using volume data. He incorporated a company—Anatomical Travelogue—to use his experience and knowledge for medical imaging and content production. The recipient of numerous awards, including the World Press Award and several Art Director's Awards, Tsiaras and his work have been featured on over 150 covers of magazines including LIFE, TIME, New York Times magazine, Discover, Smithsonian, GEO and The London Sunday Times magazine. Most recently, he is the author of From Conception to Birth: a Life Unfolds and Architecture, Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed , The InVision Guide to a Healthy Heart, The InVision Guide to a Sexual Health and The InVision Guide to Lifeblood.

Tsiaras has given the keynote speeches at many conferences including the National Library of Medicine (NLM/NIH) Scientific Visualization Conference, TEDMED, Molecular Imaging 2020, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) and has lectured with Stephen Hawking at the MIT Media Lab.

Tsiaras’ company has won the Webby Award for the best Health site on the Internet. In 2009, he created and launched TheVisualMD.com, which is revolutionizing health information online by moving it from what is presently a text based system to a visually compelling evidenced based experience derived from real scans.