Newswise — May 7, 2019—(BRONX, N.Y.)—Sanjay Gupta, M.D., CNN’s award-winning chief medical correspondent, will deliver the keynote address at the 2019 commencement ceremony for Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon, has covered major health stories from around the world, including the successful 27-hour surgical separation of conjoined twins Jadon and Anias McDonald at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore (CHAM) in 2016.
Einstein’s 61st graduation will be held Thursday, May 23 at 3 p.m. at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. This year’s ceremony marks the first time Einstein will confer its own degrees, after achieving degree-granting authority earlier this year. Dr. Gupta will receive an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Einstein at the event.
“Dr. Gupta is an inspiring physician whose careful reporting has educated viewers around the world on important topics, including the opioid crisis, health care reform, pandemic outbreaks, and cancer,” said Gordon F. Tomaselli, M.D., the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Dean at Einstein and executive vice president and chief academic officer at Montefiore Medicine. “Now more than ever, our graduates will appreciate his insights into the importance of communicating his views on evidence-based science and medicine.”
Dr. Gupta’s reporting has taken him from U.S. Navy battlefield medical units in Baghdad and harrowing rescue missions with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan to devastated areas hit by natural disasters in New Orleans, Haiti, Japan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Puerto Rico. Dr. Gupta has performed life-saving brain surgery five times in a desert operating room, investigated the deadly Ebola outbreak in Conakry Guinea Africa, and reported on the Flint, Michigan water crisis and Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida. He has won two Emmy awards, and contributed to the network’s Peabody Award-winning coverage of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He also contributed to CNN’s coverage of the 2004 tsunami in South Asia, which won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, and he earned a DuPont-Columbia Award for his enterprise reporting in the primetime documentaries, “WEED.”
Dr. Gupta chronicled the McDonald twins’ dramatic surgery at CHAM, then followed their recovery and hosted a special report, “Separated: Saving The Twins,” an in-depth account of the boys’ life before, during, and after their operation. The report won the News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Science, Medical, and Environmental Reporting in 2018.
“Dr. Gupta’s compassionate and knowledgeable operating room reports on Jadon and Anias provided viewers with a front-row seat to the remarkable work of Montefiore’s team of surgeons, physicians, nurses, and healthcare specialists,” said Steven M. Safyer, M.D., President and CEO of Montefiore Medicine. “He helped the world witness Montefiore’s and Einstein’s medical and scientific prowess, cutting-edge technology, and outstanding patient care and he did it with the greatest sensitivity to the risks faced by these boys and their family.”
Dr. Gupta, a graduate of University of Michigan Medical School, completed a neurosurgical fellowship at the Semmes Murphey Clinic and a residency at the University of Michigan Medical Center. He is a member of the staff and faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine and associate chief of neurosurgery at Grady Memorial Hospital.
Dr. Gupta currently hosts CNN’s Chasing Life, is also host of Vital Signs on CNN and CNN International, contributes to the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, and is executive producer of the HBO Documentary Unit. He is author of three New York Times best-selling books, “Chasing Life,” “Cheating Death,” and “Monday Mornings.”
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About Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Albert Einstein College of Medicine is one of the nation’s premier centers for research, medical education and clinical investigation. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Einstein is home to 711 M.D. students, 160 Ph.D. students, 107 students in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program, and 265 postdoctoral research fellows. The College of Medicine has more than 1,800 full-time faculty members located on the main campus and at its clinical affiliates. In 2018, Einstein received more than $172 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This includes the funding of major research centers at Einstein in aging, intellectual development disorders, diabetes, cancer, clinical and translational research, liver disease, and AIDS. Other areas where the College of Medicine is concentrating its efforts include developmental brain research, neuroscience, cardiac disease, and initiatives to reduce and eliminate ethnic and racial health disparities. Its partnership with Montefiore, the University Hospital and academic medical center for Einstein, advances clinical and translational research to accelerate the pace at which new discoveries become the treatments and therapies that benefit patients. Einstein runs one of the largest residency and fellowship training programs in the medical and dental professions in the United States through Montefiore and an affiliation network involving hospitals and medical centers in the Bronx, Brooklyn and on Long Island. For more information, please visit www.einstein.yu.edu, read our blog, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and view us on YouTube.
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