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>>Dr. Joseph Castro: We are emphasizing our agricultural programs here on the campus and in the
Valley, and the Jordan gift is going to help us to strengthen those programs and make
them among the best in the nation.
>>Dr. Sandra Witte: The Jordan gift is an amazing story. It's a
story of building relationships with people. And this relationship developed
over a twenty-year period. And in Bud Jordan's will, he left us 29.5 million
dollars that we could use, first of all, to focus on agriculture. Secondly, it
needed to have a research focus. And lastly, we could use that money to build
a building if that is what our need was. What it has allowed us to do is build a building
of which there is nothing else like it in the entire CSU system.
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30,000 square feet of research space, including wet labs dedicated entirely to
agriculture. And with an emphasis in collaboration and the promotion of bringing
great minds together to solve the problems in agriculture that we face
today. So that means that we'll be seeing individuals from engineering, from
science and math — even from health and human services — that have an interest in
people,
the food we eat, the products that we produce and the challenges that we face
throughout agriculture, which as you know, are monumental.
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>>Joshua Keith: The ability to do undergraduate research here at Fresno State is huge.
Students can work side-by-side with
professors in order to find something new, discover something great,
using, you know, the finest technology, some of the best technology that we can get. And
apply what we learn in the classroom to a real-world application.
>>Dr. Andrew Lawson: It's difficult
for us to find laboratory space because of the way the budget model and the way
to CSU system is funded, we end up carving lab space out of buildings that maybe
weren't originally intended for use as research space.
And this is an exciting opportunity to have a building that is built from the ground up, designed for
research for our faculty and students. And that's really exciting.
>>Greg Estep: There's a lot of research all over the world in terms of
agriculture. But a lot of that research is not necessarily being done where the
crops are grown. So here in Fresno, there's over 400 different crops
around this community. So we really feel like the reason we located this business
here in Fresno ... we also feel that if the research is taking place here, where all
the action is in terms of production, where you have that kind of diversity in crops ...
we think that that's the right location to have a world-class agricultural
research facility really right here where all the crops are grown.
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>>Dr. Ram Nunna: As a university, we are in the business of educating students, and we do that really
well. But when you want to do something above and beyond just pure education, you really
need support from multiple sources. So individuals, corporations and foundations
can really play a huge role in allowing us to transform ourselves from being a
traditional education-based university to a research-based university.
>>Estep: What we've committed
to with Fresno State is around the sensory lab. So looking at the way
different products taste based on what's the end use of that product. So
whether it's tomatoes that are going into a pasta sauce or tomatoes that are going
into salsa, there could be different flavor components of those tomatoes that go into it.
>>Lawson: Industry is incredibly important for providing support for our students. Not only
financially, but when industry gets involved in the classroom, and when
industry gets involved in projects, it allows a real-world applicability to
some of these research projects that allows our students to take that classroom
knowledge and really apply it into something meaningful in the field, and
something that can be applied today in industry.
>>Estep: So another reason that we
wanted to reach out was to partner with the University, but also so that we could
work closer with students early on in their education, give them more exposure
to our business, and try to get people more interested in jobs in
agriculture, 'cause we're gonna need those kinds of students for the future.
Lawson: Without the generosity of the Jordan family, this building wouldn't exist. And there's so
much that we do here Fresno State that relies on philanthropy and the generous giving of
our community. We would certainly hope that some additional gifts will not
only help to put some state-of-the-art equipment into the building, but also
provide for scholarships and for research fellowships for some of our
undergraduate and graduate students.
>>Witte: The Jordan Agricultural Research Center is a transformational opportunity for
the University. We expect the center to be opening in 2016.
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