A major gift from Lehigh Valley engineer, developer and businessman Gopal “Kris” Kapoor and his wife, Preeta, will support several medical scholarships annually for Temple/St. Luke’s School of Medicine students who are from the Lehigh Valley.

“We are very strong believers in the power of education to transform lives,” said Kris Kapoor, former co-owner of the Fuller cement company in Catasauqua. “That’s why we chose to support St. Luke’s. It is the only medical school in the Lehigh Valley that will educate and train young doctors here in our community. We are so happy that our contribution will go toward scholarships to benefit these students.”

In recent years, the Kapoors and other donors have allowed St. Luke’s to establish an endowment of nearly $25 million for scholarships to help medical students achieve the dream of serving others as physicians.

The Kapoors were recently recognized at a reception at the St. Luke’s Bethlehem Campus celebrating the couple’s transformational gift. In their honor, the Doctors’ Pavilion at the campus has been renamed The Preeta and Kris Kapoor Family Doctors’ Pavilion.

“Over the past decade, a third of the nearly 300 physicians who have graduated from Temple/St. Luke’s, the Lehigh Valley’s only medical school, have continued their training at St. Luke’s or are now employed as attending physicians,” St. Luke’s President & CEO Rick Anderson said.

Born and educated in India, Kris Kapoor said he was drawn to the “freedom and excitement of the Western world” after graduating from the Delhi College of Engineering in 1958. He first traveled to Germany to learn about cement machinery and, a year later, was working in Catasauqua as a design engineer with Fuller Company. He spent his evenings taking post-graduate classes at Lehigh University, where he studied subjects that furthered his engineering knowledge and helped him understand the complexities of the company’s international business reach.

Kapoor then turned his focus toward real estate development, building nearly 300 homes in the Macungie area.

In Kapoor’s commitment to the Lehigh Valley, he was one of the founders of the Hindu Temple Society of Allentown and was Chairman of the board of trustees, along with being on the board of the Allentown Rescue Mission, ArtsQuest and the ArtsQuest Foundation.

“We’ve always been pleased with the quality of the care we’ve received,” said Kapoor. “So, when Preeta and I were thinking of ways we could give back to our community, we decided that a good way to help was to send more well-trained doctors out into the world.”