Gupta’s parents came to Michigan from India. As engineers, they worked in the 1960s at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. Dr. Gupta himself worked as an advisor to Hillary Clinton from 1997-1998, when he was one of fifteen “White House Fellows.”
In 2001, he joined CNN during the summer and is now a regular on the highly rated news channel. One of the first major news events that he covered was the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Now the chief medical correspondent for CNN, Gupta, who is a practicing neurosurgeon, has a background in medicine which enables him to have an important role within the network and the coverage it produces. He currently has a half-hour weekend show on the network called House Call with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and is a regular on other network programs when they need a medical expert.
In 2003, Gupta went to Irag and Kuwait and reported on a variety of medical issues. He even performed brain surgery five times while he was there and routinely helped in the operating rooms. That same year, Gupta was named one of the “Sexiest Men Alive” by People magazine.
In 2004, Gupta went to Thailand for the International Aids Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, to report on the event and the disease. After that, he went to Sri Lanka to cover the aftermath of the tsunami that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the area.
Gupta now resides in Atlanta, where he co-hosts Accent Health for Turner Private Networks. Among other duties, Gupta is also an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University and the associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. In addition to that, he currently writes a column for TIME magazine and has also authored a book, Chasing Life, that’s become a New York Times bestseller. And as if all that weren’t enough, Gupta has now even started a podcast that runs weekly.
Most recently, Gupta made a reported deal with CBS and CNN. The agreement would evidently entail Gupta doing a certain amount of reports a year for news programs like 60 Minutes and The Evening News with Katie Couric.
In his People magazine profile, Gupta was candid about his doctoring style, saying, ''A recent study said that most doctors interrupt their patient within 11 seconds. I don’t. I think I’m an emotional doctor. I’ll sit right down next to them on the bed and talk.''
