ATLANTA — It was 9:45 a.m. and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, was 15 minutes late for his interview — with me.

He had a good excuse, of course.

Gupta just got off the air talking about a trip he took to New Mexico to see Nick Charles, CNN’s first sports anchor, who was dying of bladder cancer. Though he had just recapped a depressing and heartbreaking story, Gupta walked through CNN’s medical unit floor at an energetic pace and greeted a fellow Wolverine he’d never met before like an old friend.

He welcomed me in his corner office overlooking Centennial Olympic Park, where giant steel torches remind tourists that Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics. Though it was the middle of June, grey clouds spanned the sky and threatened rain. At first, Gupta’s mood reflected the odd summer weather as he told me about the segment he just finished about his longtime friend who was losing a battle with life. But as the subject turned to Michigan and the days he spent as a resident advisor in West Quad, the smile that got him named one of People’s “Sexiest Men Alive” made an appearance.

It’s also that smile that greets American Morning viewers at 7:30 a.m. to warn of the health risks of cell phones or announce groundbreaking medical discoveries like the cause of Lou Gerhig’s disease. It’s the smile that greets patients with life-threatening tumors to let them know they’re going to be OK. And it’s the smile that ignited after Michigan football games, when the Wolverines creamed Ohio State and Ann Arbor erupted in celebration.

And it’s that smile Gupta wore as he proudly talked of his college days: “I was pretty true blue. It would have taken a lot to get me not to go to Michigan.”

Gupta attended the University of Michigan starting in 1986. He remained there the next seven years as part of Inteflex — a now defunct program that combined pre-med and medical school and accepted students straight out of high school. While Gupta applied to several universities, he grew up watching Michigan sports with his dad, an alum, and fell in love with Ann Arbor at an early age.

“I was pretty confident I wanted to go there when I was in grade school,” he said.

At the University, he had mentors like Karin Muraszko, current chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, neurosurgeon Greg Thompson and Julian Hoff, the chair of the neurosurgery department at the time, who Gupta considered not only a role model, but a father figure.

It was these surgeons, and many others, who trained the man Forbes would name one of “the most influential celebrities” in 2011.

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As a teen, Gupta suffered a significant head injury that was treated at the University Hospital. People mistakenly assume that sparked his decision to enter a career in neurosurgery.

But Gupta originally wanted to be a pediatrician. That changed when his grandfather had a stroke during his third year in Medical School. Gupta came to know his grandfather’s neurosurgeons who took time to answer questions the curious student posed about their field.

“I thought the idea that you’re working on a part of the body that is constantly changing in terms of what we know about it would make it a very dynamic field, that every operation was different in some way — I thought that was exciting,” Gupta said.

Fast forward to today, and Gupta suits up in scrubs at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, but not as the full-time neurosurgeon he thought he would be. On a pie chart of his career, the circle is split half medicine and half media.

So how did a neurosurgeon come to win an Emmy for Outstanding Feature Story, a Health Communications Achievement Award from the American Medical Association and title of “Journalist of the Year?” You could say it was all about timing — and meeting the right people.

His journalism career kicked off at The Michigan Daily where he wrote opinion pieces about public health policies.