Annual Meeting 2006

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta to speak

One could convincingly argue that Dr. Sanjay Gupta still makes house calls. He just does it in bulk.

As a senior medical correspondent for the health and medical unit at CNN, his duties include daily medical stories, the weekend show “House Call with Dr. Sanjay Gupta,” and coverage of breaking medical news. He is also a columnist for Time magazine.

That kind of visibility, coupled with Gupta’s medical acumen, has led to numerous accolades including “Journalist of the Year” by the Atlanta Press Club in 2004, the Humanitarian Award from the National Press Photographers Association, a GOLD award from the National Health Care Communicators, and finalist honors for the International Health and Medical Media Award, the “Freddie.”

But being in the public eye has had an unexpected result as well. USA Today named Gupta a “pop culture icon,” and People magazine called him one of the “Sexiest Men Alive.” Although he probably won’t be addressing either of those topics at the January 26 annual joint meeting of Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula’s Auxiliary and Community Hospital Foundation, the celebrity accolades certainly can’t hurt the presentation.

Actually, Gupta’s résumé looks as good as he does. Having received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and his doctorate of medicine from the University of Michigan Medical Center, Gupta is a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital, and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Gupta joined CNN during the summer of 2001 and became part of the network team covering the
September 11 attacks in New York City, including breaking news about anthrax.

Two years later, he spent time in Iraq and Kuwait, reporting on various medical issues related to the “escalating tension” with Iraq. An embedded correspondent with the U.S. Navy’s medical unit, the “Devil Docs,” Gupta provided live coverage from a desert operating room, a stint that included performing brain surgery five times.

In 2004, he attended the international AIDS conference in Bangkok, Thailand, and reported on the pandemic for CNN. At the end of the year, he was sent to Sri Lanka to cover the devastation of the tsunami that took upward of 155,000 lives in South Asia.

Before joining CNN, Gupta was a neurosurgeon at the University of Tennessee’s Semmes-Murphy clinic and, before that, at the University of Michigan Medical Center. He became partner of the Great Lakes Brain and Spine Institute in 2000. One of only 15 appointed as a White House Fellow in 1997, he served as special adviser to the First Lady.