Meet Our Donors
J. Kenneth Brubaker, MD, CMD 1970 College of Medicine
J. Kenneth Brubaker, MD, CMD 1970 College of Medicine
Kenneth Brubaker and his wife, Pamela, have made philanthropy part of their lifestyle ever since they married. Both are health care professionals, deeply devoted to the frail elderly and the families who love them. In addition to demanding careers, the Brubakers have translated their shared passion into philanthropy aimed at encouraging the education of more physicians in the field. The J. Kenneth Brubaker, M.D. Endowed Scholarship Fund provides scholarship aid to promising but economically disadvantaged medical students whose career choice is family practice, ideally geriatrics.
Ken counts off three main things he likes about the Charitable Reminder Unitrust (CRUT) that he designed with Drexel planned-giving experts for his scholarship fund: 1) You can take a charitable deduction, while 2) supporting an institution you believe in, yet 3) for those who may need it, the law allows the money to generate an income stream for the donor while it is in the fund. A fourth benefit accrued for Ken when the Schleyer Family Matching Gift Challenge for Scholarships in Medicine matched the fund, essentially doubling its impact.
Ken and Pam have had lively discussions around their joint giving, most vigorously on the topic of how much to save, how much to give children and grandchildren, and how much to distribute charitably. Based on these exchanges and his long experience helping families when a loved-one is dying, Ken asserts that "these end-of-life conversations are the ones all families need to have. It's important to explain to your children what you're doing and why."
Early in Ken's career, a series of coincidences led him into family medicine with a large group practice in his hometown area of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. This suited him well, though he was unenthusiastic about requests from nearby nursing homes for "house calls" for their very ill patients. Yet, he soon discovered that he loved the impact he could have on the lives of those he calls the "frail elderly," sometimes just by paying careful attention. By the late-1980s he pursued a newly developed fellowship in geriatrics and says, "I've been deeply involved in that ever since, and I get great joy out of it."
In 2000, Ken left private practice to start his own geriatric training program. "There's such a great need for this!" he explains. "Very few doctors are interested, and those who are often can't afford to pursue geriatrics because the pay is comparatively low and med school debts are high." In addition to encouragement and training, Ken believes he has ideas for careers and other wisdom to share with his protégés in geriatrics. He looks forward to offering all of this to recipients of his endowed scholarships.
Ken says that when he returned to campus recently, he was "really impressed with the education experiences" today's Drexel University College of Medicine is able to give their students. "I came up in the era of 'See one, do one, teach one,'" he chuckles. "We did not have the kind of labs and learning center you see now, with high-fidelity mannequins to practice procedures on." The medical simulation center offers first-year students the kind of practice opportunities that flight-simulators have given pilots for years, and benefits from continual updates developed in collaboration with Drexel University's schools of engineering and media design. "I see a lot of future potential growth there because so much of medicine is going towards engineering," Ken observes. "That's a great strength of Drexel - that marriage of medical science with such a fine school of engineering."
And you can be sure that whatever future developments benefit elderly patients, Ken will be teaching them to new generations of physicians.