Evelyn Lauder
A breast cancer survivor and Estée Lauder executive who co-created the pink ribbon in 1992 and founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993, now one of the largest private funders of breast cancer research.
Evelyn Lauder (1936-2011) came to New York as a child refugee from Vienna and became a senior executive at the Estée Lauder Companies. After her own treatment for breast cancer, she worked with Alexandra Penney of Self magazine in 1992 to create and distribute the pink ribbon at Estée Lauder counters, launching the Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign that has since collected millions of signatures for research funding. In 1993 she founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation with a model of low overhead and rapid, investigator-driven grants; it has become one of the largest private funders of breast cancer research in the world, supporting many of the investigators behind current therapy. She helped create the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering. She died of ovarian cancer in November 2011.