Hunter College in New York City has received a $10 million gift from cosmetics executive Leonard A. Lauder in support of research and scholarships at its school of nursing, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The gift — made in memory of Lauder's first wife, Evelyn, who died in 2011 from non-genetic ovarian cancer — will support the faculty salaries and research, scholarships for students, and the purchase and maintenance of instructional equipment. Evelyn Lauder graduated from Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, in 1958 with a degree in anthropology. She later embarked on long careers as a public-school teacher and an executive at Estée Lauder, the cosmetics firm founded by her husband's parents. After receiving a breast cancer diagnosis in 1993, she founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

In 2011, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder and his brother, Ronald, and Ronald's wife, Jo Carole, received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Although Leonard Lauder is best known in philanthropic circles for his support for the arts, including gifts of $1 billion in art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and gifts to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lauder told the Journal that he was turning more of his focus to breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

"I have a long-term dream that we should and must have, over the next five to ten years, more storefront walk-in clinics run by physician's assistants, the highest level of nursing," he told the Journal. "If we want to be able to care for our population in the long run and not skyrocket the cost of medical care, we need to eventually have far more of the services handled by people who are graduates of nursing schools."