CNN WATCHERS are used to seeing Dr. Sanjay Gupta talk about high cholesterol or LASIK, but these days, they’re more likely to see the practicing neurosurgeon and medical correspondent reporting from disaster areas and war zones. And he doesn’t just look good in a flak jacket. While embedded with a team of U.S. military doctors in the early days of the Iraq War, he was called upon to perform emergency surgery five times. In recent weeks, Gupta has been reporting from Israel and Lebanon, where the Israeli army and Hezbollah guerillas are engaged in a vicious if accidental war.

In this context, Gupta’s reporting on civilian casualties and hospital conditions has come across as both compassionate and even-handed because he is a doctor, and doctors, we hope, don’t take sides.

While TV’s Info Hunks don body armor and squint into the desert sun, Gupta is often in hospital scrubs, describing scenes of triage caused by Israeli airstrikes in Beirut and showing the effects of souped-up Katusha rockets in Haifa. In Beirut, his dispatch from a bombed-out hospital nursery was a textbook example of emo-journalism at its most sincere; he makes us care, not cringe.

“I’ve gone from seeing things through a microscope—quite literally, during surgery—to a telescope,” he told Emory magazine. “Now I can see the larger picture and broader horizons.” Horizons that extend far beyond the town of Chelsea, Michigan (population 4,000), where he grew up as the oldest son of the only Indian family in town. Gupta received both his undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and went on to become a CNN correspondent in 2001. Since then, he has reported on the conditions of tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and earthquake survivors in Pakistan. “Just being south Asian, I related differently,” he has said of those experiences. “But I always feel a lot of affinity with people in tragic situations.” Gupta still teaches and practices brain surgery in the Atlanta area.

With his high-profile TV persona and cross-over appeal, he’s helping to change the persistent image of many Asian American men as—let’s face it—Model Minority nerds. Confident and charismatic, he’s Asian America’s own Dr. McDreamy, having been named one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men and inspiring fan sites run by “Gupta girls.”

The good doctor is a welcome departure from the Asian glamourpusses we’re used to seeing paired up with a white male anchor. “Every major media market has had female Asian reporters and anchors for a long time,” Columbia University’s School of Journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan said in Atlanta’s Sunday Paper. “Television news has historically been a very hard profession for Asian men to break into.” No wonder Gupta was chosen as this year’s keynote speaker at the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention. “If you look at Asian American history in this country, there has been this desire to go into fields like medicine, engineering and law—’stable professions’ if you will,” Gupta told AAJA Link. “It’s changing now as Asian Americans from all different backgrounds have started to pursue what can be called ‘nontraditional’ fields and have become very good at them.”

Within the desi community, he’s even managed to raise the status of journalists in the eyes of achievement-minded parents. “The role that Sanjay plays in journalism is like the role that the Beastie Boys and Eminem played in rap,” Sreenivasan has said. “Maybe no one else of his race had done this, but now children of Indian descent in America could point to Sanjay and say ‘I want to be like Sanjay Gupta.’”

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