A true visionary

Tom Ruggia applies life lessons to his startup
company that gives eyesight to the blind.

Words by Michael Blanding

Samsara Vision CEO, Tom Ruggia '98

Tom Ruggia ’98 is a man of focus. Throughout his life, he’s always had a clear vision of his goals and the steps needed to achieve them. “Preparation is where you win,” he says.

It’s a lesson Ruggia initially learned from being an athlete — first as a captain of the TCNJ football team. “Your position is only on the field for maybe 30 minutes of each contest, but still you’re practicing 365 days a year, two hours a day,” he says. Then he started running marathons and gradually added biking and swimming to his repertoire — eventually becoming an Ironman competitor. To date, he’s competed in six full Ironmans and 12 half-Ironmans. He wakes at 4 a.m. to train for several hours before work. “It absorbs some of my energy, so I can really be my best,” he says.

Ruggia’s penchant for hard work and preparation is perhaps most evident in his role as CEO of Samsara Vision, a Far Hills, New Jersey–based company that makes prosthetic devices to be implanted in patients’ eyes to help improve sight. Samsara’s technologies specifically address age-related macular degeneration, a medical condition in which cells in a part of the retina called the macula are damaged, causing patients to develop blind spots in their central vision. AMD is the leading cause of vision loss in individuals over the age of 65.

A desire to improve the lives of patients with special needs stemmed from his own family’s experiences. Ruggia’s younger brother was born with a rare condition called mucopolysaccharide disorder. Given proper care and effective treatment, his brother was able to thrive, and now, at age 45, he remains one of Ruggia’s biggest inspirations. “I always look at what he’s done and think I’m still underperforming wherever I’m at,” says Ruggia.

The first in his family to go to college, Ruggia was a kinesiology major at TCNJ. He originally intended to pursue physical therapy after college. But a gap-year position in pharmaceutical sales sparked a different interest. The excitement he experienced in the competitive sales environment suited his personality and his drive to achieve. That position led to work in the ophthalmology industry for Alcon and Johnson & Johnson before he assumed the chief executive position at Samsara in 2020.

As Samsara’s CEO, Ruggia has spearheaded efforts to get the AMD technology into the hands of doctors and has also secured regulatory approval and insurance coverage in countries all over the world. “The hardest part of the job is to take a novel technology and make the ophthalmology community aware this is a good option for patients,” he says.

Samsara’s procedure surgically inserts a telescope just four millimeters thick into the back of the eye, where it can magnify the image to shrink the blind spot and allow patients to see again. To date, the Samsara devices have restored vision to more than 450 patients worldwide.

For several dozen of these patients, Ruggia has been in the operating room to observe. “The frustration patients feel about losing their vision really impacts their psyche,” he says. “When they can start to see again, they cry, and the surgeon cries, and I cry — it’s amazing.”

Photo: Peter Murphy