Iowa State President Martin Jischke announced a $10 million endowment to the ISU Plant Science Institute Saturday morning, a gift that ISU officials say will make the university’s agricultural aspirations a reality.

The donation came from Norma Baker of Los Angeles, daughter-in-law of the late Raymond and Mary Baker, who allegedly gave $80 million to the College of Agriculture.

Norma Baker asked not to be questioned about the donation, given in honor of her husband, who was a 1954 graduate of ISU.

“We are touched and indeed overwhelmed by the generosity of Norma Baker and her gift in memory of her late husband, Laurence H. Baker, a truly remarkable man,” Jischke said.

Colin Scanes, interim director of the Plant Science Institute and associate dean of the College of Agriculture, said this donation and previous ones are helping the college leave its mark.

Jischke said there are three parts to Baker’s gift. First, it will fund the Lawrence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics.

Second, her gift is creating the first-ever endowed chair for the Department of Statistics. It will be the Laurence H. Baker Chair in Agricultural Statistics. In addition, a classroom in Snedecor Hall will be named in Baker’s honor.

The third part of the gift is the $10 million endowment to the Plant Science Institute, which ISU Foundation President Tom Mitchell said will amount to $150,000 per year.

Jischke said that institute’s goal is to raise at least $100 million from the private sector and match those donations with state funding during the next 10 years.

“This is the largest amount of money we have ever tried to raise for a single Iowa State program,” Jischke said.

Now that the gift has been announced, the next step is to fill the new Laurence H. Baker Chair in Agricultural Statistics.

Dean Isaacson, head of the statistics department, said faculty members will meet today to discuss the guidelines for how the new chair will be defined.

New faculty members also will be hired to fill positions in the Plant Science Institute, Jischke said. He estimated that up to 19 new faculty members would be hired.

The Laurence H. Baker Center of Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics is the first endowed center in the Plant Sciences Institute.

The focus of the center is to gather and interpret the mass amount of genetic information making up plants by using both genetics and mathematics.

“Our center for bioinformatics and biological statistics will try to bring the modern computing to the truly immense challenge of understanding plants at a genetic level,” Jischke said.