From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.
By friends and colleagues, Department of Botany
Vicki Funk was a Senior Research Botanist and Curator at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany. She was a world expert on the taxonomy and biogeography of the sunflower family, Compositae, which is the largest family of flowering plants with more than 27,000 species. During her distinguished career, Vicki achieved preeminence in the fields of plant systematics, phylogenetic methods, biogeography, and biodiversity conservation. Vicki’s global research, innovative ideas, and passion for mentoring have had a strong influence on the direction of botanical research and the career development of many colleagues, students and collaborators, both nationally and internationally. Following treatment for an aggressive cancer, Vicki died at her home in Arlington, Virginia on 22 October 2019.
Throughout her career, Vicki sustained an outstanding level of productivity, authoring more than 320 peer-reviewed publications and serving as an editor/author of nine collaborative books. The spectacular book Systematics, Evolution, and Biogeography of the Compositae (2009) will be a long-lasting testament to her legacy and impact on the field of plant biology. This nearly 1,000-page collaboration brought together essentially all of the world’s experts and, in an award-winning standardized format, elaborated the evolution and classification of each genus across the entire family. The book is the most authoritative reference for the largest family of plants.
Vicki not only published extensively on the Compositae, but also was responsible for organizing major collaborative projects that generated a range of ground-breaking studies on the systematics and evolution of this large, diverse, ecologically important and taxonomically difficult family. As early as 1980, she was instrumental in pioneering the use and development of modern phylogenetic methods (cladistics) in systematic botany and indeed across biology overall. As well, she recurrently participated in or organized research symposia which generated three seminal works (Funk and Brooks 1981, Advances in cladistics: Proceedings of the first meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; Platnick and Funk 1983, Advances in cladistics: Proceedings of the second meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; Wagner and Funk 1995, Hawaiian Biogeography: Evolution on a hot spot Archipelago). These volumes hastened an avalanche of new analyses on phylogenetics, biogeography and study of island evolution.
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