Billionaire Cosmetics Heir Gives $125 Million to U. of Pennsylvania Nursing School

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

University of Pennsylvania

The billionaire cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder has given $125 million to create the Leonard A. Lauder Community Care Nurse Practitioner Program, which will recruit students from underrepresented backgrounds to study at the university’s nursing school. The program will train more nurse practitioners as frontline health workers and provide primary care to individuals and families in underserved communities across the United States.

Lauder earned his undergraduate degree in business from the university’s Wharton School in 1954. He is chairman emeritus of the Estée Lauder Companies, the cosmetics company created in 1946 by his parents, Estée and Joseph Lauder.

Virginia Commonwealth University

R. Todd Stravitz has given $104 million through his family’s Barbara Brunckhorst Foundation to advance research at the Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health. A medical doctor who spent his career as a liver clinician and researcher, Stravitz retired in 2020 after a decade as medical director of liver transplantation at VCU Health’s Hume-Lee Transplant Center.

His gift will help to hire more researchers and health care workers for liver-related clinical specialties, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, end-stage liver disease, liver transplantation, liver cancer, liver health issues in women, and rare diseases in hepatology. Because liver donations are in short supply, the institute will also develop alternatives to transplantation for people with advanced liver disease and invest in gene therapy and other treatments in development at biotechnology companies.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital

The hospital has received $45 million from Neil Bluhm through the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation to establish the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Heart Hospital. The gift expands the work of the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, which he created with a major gift in 2005. His new gift will upgrade hospital technology for cardiac services, back research, build more hospital beds dedicated to cardiac care, and address health equity by increasing access to cardiovascular treatment and health resources for people from underserved communities in the Chicago area.

Bluhm co-founded JMB Realty Corporation, a real-estate investment firm in Chicago. In 2018 he gave the institute $25 million to develop artificial intelligence for cardiovascular care and other cardiac research.

Claremont Graduate University

Patrick Cadigan left $42 million to build a new facility for the university’s School of Arts and Humanities, which will also house space for business faculty and students to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors. The bequest is coming through the Patrick F. Cadigan Family Foundation.

Cadigan, who died in 2020, was a real-estate investor who owned nearly $1 billion in apartment properties throughout California’s Orange County. He earned his master’s degree from the university in 1978 and a doctoral degree in management in 1980.

University of Miami

Michele Bowman Underwood has pledged $25 million toward the university’s capital campaign. The planned bequest will benefit the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, which will be named in her honor. The money will also pay for research focused on women’s health at the Miller School of Medicine and back scholarships and programs for the women’s golf team.

Bowman Underwood is an avid golfer, polyglot, and traveler who designated her gift to reflect her myriad passions and hobbies. She was born to a French Jewish-Catholic family and grew up in Algiers, Algeria, during World War II. After the war, her family lived in Brazil and Chile before emigrating to the United States where she found work as a translator because she speaks French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Her late first husband, Philip Bowman, was president and chairman of Bristol Laboratories and executive vice president of the Bristol-Myers Company. He died in 1987. She and her second husband, Joseph Underwood, have played golf on 1,000 courses in more than 120 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Mediterranean, and North America.

Cooper Institute

The billionaire Arthur Blank gave $15 million through his Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation for research on healthy aging, particularly the value of aerobics in preventive medicine and deeper dives into public-health areas like the impact of Covid-19. The gift will establish a research chair in honor of Kenneth Cooper, the medical doctor who created the institute in Dallas and has been studying the positive effects of aerobic exercise on longevity for more than 50 years. It will also preserve data from the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, which dates to 1970, and make it available to medical researchers, health professionals, and the public.

Blank, who retired as CEO of Home Depot in 2001, sits on the institute’s board. He is also the chairman, owner, and CEO of the Atlanta Falcons football team.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated throughout the week.