the university. When MIT moved to its current location in Cambridge in 1917, Pierre, T. Coleman du Pont and Charles Hayden donated $215,000 to house the Department of Mining, Engineering and Metallurgy (now the Department of Materials Science and Engineering). Du Pont served on multiple boards and committees, and from 1916 to 1951 he was a member of the MIT Corporation, the university's board of trustees. Along with his brother Lammot, he was given the honor of being made a life member emeritus when he stepped down from the board in 1951. In 2000, the DuPont MIT Alliance (DMA) was formed. Over the next 10 years, the DuPont corporation donated $55 million to the university to fund as many as 20 different research projects. Later life Pierre retired from DuPont's board in 1940. He also served on the Delaware State Board of Education and donated millions to Delaware's public schools, financing the replacement of Delaware's dilapidated Negro schools. In 1943, his genealogical research book, Genealogy of the Du Pont family, 1739–1942, was published. Personal life He was a bachelor until age 45. On October 16, 1915, after the death of his mother, he married his first cousin Alice Belin (1872–1944), a daughter of Henry Belin Jr., from Scranton, Pennsylvania. The ceremony was at 400 Park Avenue, the home of her brother F. Lammot Belin - they were married in New York because Pennsylvania law prohibited first cousins from marrying. They had no children. His wife died at their home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1944. Du Pont died nearly ten years later on April 4, 1954 at the Memorial Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. After a funeral held at Longwood, he was buried in the Du Pont family cemetery near the Brandywine River. Legacy In 1919 du Pont became a member of the Delaware board of education, becoming president in the 1920s. At the time, state law prohibited money raised from white taxpayers from being used to support the state's schools for black children. Appalled by the condition of the black schools, du Pont donated four million dollars to construct eighty-six new school buildings. By 1927, it was reported that he had provided school buildings for 43% of Delaware's schoolchildren. In 1925 he became Delaware's tax commissioner, and used his position to modernize the tax office and ensure tax collection. In 1927, du Pont became the president of the