Dr. Strauss began pastoral work in 1980 and international medical work in 1986 serving as a consultant for both governmental and non-governmental international projects. With a primary interest in education and pastoral care, he developed innovative techniques to combine cross cultural spiritual formation with high quality surgical training.

In 2004, Dr. Strauss left his private practice and church ministry for full-time work as a volunteer on Mercy Ships performing thousands of cataract operations and training dozens of U.S. and international ophthalmologists. His development work resulted in a state-of-the-art surgical training simulator for developing nations, a companion published surgical textbook, and a cloud-based quality assurance tool for surgical outcome monitoring.

For his work in medical education, in 2009, he was awarded the highest civilian honor, the National Order of Commander, by the president of Benin, Africa. In 2017 he received The Albert Ueltschi Award for Simulation in Ophthalmology presented by the International Society for Manual Small Incision Cataract Surgery, and in 2019, was honored to receive the Christian Ophthalmology Society J. Lawton Smith Award for exemplary service.

A published Christian author (Finding the Way, 2019), bible teacher, and international trainer, he
continues to work on training others in the art of transformative relationships. Ministries include the
Strauss Medical Mentoring Project (for international training and discipling) and The Tyler Garden Oasis (for those in spiritual crisis). All work is supported through donations to their projects on the New
Horizons Foundation web site.