The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation

The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation

Steven A. Cohen founded The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation in 2001 with his wife Alexandra, channeling a portion of the wealth he generated at SAC Capital Advisors into a formal philanthropic institution. The foundation operates from Stamford, Connecticut, and has grown into one of the most active private grantmakers in the United States, with cumulative giving exceeding $1.2 billion. Unlike many billionaire-backed foundations that spread smaller grants across hundreds of organizations, the Cohens' vehicle deploys large, concentrated gifts — a pattern familiar to anyone who watched Cohen's trading at SAC. The foundation's grantmaking concentrates on five pillars: Lyme and tick-borne disease research, children's health, veterans' services, the arts, and sustainability. The Lyme disease commitment is the signature — the foundation has committed well over $100 million to the cause, including a $20 million grant to Columbia University in 2021 that established the Cohen Center for Health and Recovery from Tick-Borne Diseases. Other notable grantees include the Robin Hood Foundation, the Child Mind Institute, and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. Grants span the New York metropolitan area and nationally, with a growing emphasis on medical research institutions across the Northeast. While Point72 Asset Management employs thousands, the foundation itself runs with a lean team. It does not disclose staff headcount. In 2024, the foundation continued its multi-year Lyme disease push, announcing additional funding commitments to accelerate diagnostic and therapeutic research. Alexandra Cohen has taken an increasingly public role in shaping the foundation's direction, co-chairing major fundraising events and speaking directly about the family's experience with Lyme disease, which has become central to the foundation's identity. The foundation's structural differentiator is its funding concentration in a single disease area that remains underfunded by the National Institutes of Health and largely ignored by other mega-donors. While the Gates Foundation focuses on global infectious disease and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pursues basic science, the Cohen Foundation has carved out a near-monopoly on private funding for tick-borne illness research in the United States. That narrow, high-conviction mandate — paired with the scale of a $1 billion-plus giving vehicle — gives it outsized influence in its chosen field.