Cassiopeia Foundation

Cassiopeia Foundation

The foundation traces its roots to 1944, when oil executive W. Alton Jones established the original charitable entity bearing his name. A major restructuring in 2001 severed the institution from its prior corporate governance, yielding the family-run Cassiopeia Foundation. Diane Edgerton Miller — granddaughter of the founder through Patricia Jones Edgerton — serves as CEO and Trustee, while her son, Zachary Miller, holds the CFO and Trustee roles. The foundation rebranded from the Blue Moon Fund to Cassiopeia Foundation in 2016, signaling a renewed focus on neuroscience and environmental resilience. Cassiopeia allocates across a deliberately broad mandate. Its portfolio spans direct real estate holdings in Charlottesville, a corporate stock portfolio anchored in US equities, and private debt investments globally. The foundation's grant-making prioritizes three pillars: education, human services, and philanthropy and voluntarism. A defining scientific commitment is the funding of focused ultrasound research for Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, channeled primarily through a partnership with the Focused Ultrasound Foundation. The foundation also supports ecological programs intended to build resilience in the face of climate change. Daily operations are managed by a compact leadership team. Chief Investment Officer Jason W. Green leads the investment function while also serving as President of Mosaico Management, an affiliated entity. Zachary Miller extends the foundation's community footprint through board service at Piedmont Virginia Community College. The foundation maintains its headquarters in Charlottesville, operating without satellite offices. Recent public disclosures indicate a continued emphasis on place-based environmental giving in Virginia alongside the long-running Alzheimer's research commitment. Cassiopeia Foundation's structural differentiator is its hybrid model: it functions simultaneously as a grant-making private foundation and a direct investor in land, private credit, and public equities. This architecture — a remnant of the 2001 restructuring that separated the foundation from the original corporate philanthropy — allows the endowment to fund long-horizon scientific research while preserving intergenerational wealth through a diversified asset base. The 2016 rebranding from Blue Moon Fund formalized this dual identity, positioning the institution as both a neuroscience research funder and an environmental resilience investor operating outside the standard university-endowment framework.