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.
Most significantly, Vicki served as Director of the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Program (BDG) for 31 years. This was a uniquely impactful international endeavor that sustained intellectual, administrative, and financial leadership that has supported countless collection and research programs. This program not only supported the collection of plants, but also included that of birds, amphibians, mammals, and insects. Over this period the BDG program made more than 60,000 new collections and databased those and another nearly 100,000 previously collected.
Another critical aspect of Vicki’s influence was her strong and sustained contribution to the development, maintenance, and curation of botanical collections. She traveled extensively around the world in pursuit of Compositae and personally made upwards of 15,000 collections. Vicki was perhaps the most effective leader in plant taxonomy and systematics to advocate for the importance of systematic collections and to warn about the continued loss of regional collections as they are incorporated into larger, widely separated herbaria. She strongly supported collections-based science, and suggested innovative ways to use collections in a series of surveys and many of her publications. Her 2018 paper on “Collections-Based Sciences in the 21st Century” elegantly expounded on the discoveries from collections‐based science that have changed the way we perceive ourselves and our environment.
Vicki was an exemplary mentor and model of achievement to students at all levels, from advising undergraduate interns to mentoring current faculty. She actively mentored more than 40 undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students and served as an unofficial mentor to countless other interns, students, and postdocs that have passed through the Botany Department. As well, she was an adjunct professor at George Mason University and Duke University. She was especially dedicated to mentoring, readily sharing her passion for research and enthusiasm for pushing the envelope in both applied methods and research questions. Vicki was extremely generous in sharing ideas and initiating collaborations that not only produced the best research results and the greatest impact on training and outreach, but were ultimately fun.
In addition to her remarkable achievements in scholarship and mentorship, Vicki had a career marked by outstanding vision and leadership through service. Most notably, she served as president of a number of major biological societies: Society for Systematic Biologists (1998–1999); International Biogeography Society, Founding Member and President (2007–2009); American Society of Plant Taxonomists (2006–2007); Botanical Society of Washington (2014); and International Association of Plant Taxonomists (2011–2017). In 2000, Vicki and her colleagues founded “The International Compositae Alliance,” which fosters work in the family and hosts international meetings.
Within the Smithsonian Institution, she not only served as Director of the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Program (1987—2018), but also began the Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (2015—2018). These programs continue to explore global biodiversity under new leadership as of 2018. Her other significant service contributions to the Smithsonian community included serving as co-chair of the Smithsonian Strategic Planning Committee and chairing the professional evaluation committee, which performs reviews for all NMNH scientists, for nearly a decade (making significant strides to revamp the overall process). Most recently, she served as an advisor to the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative; focusing on the contributions of women in science as part of the broader effort to create, disseminate, and amplify the historical record of the accomplishments of American women. All of these activities have had a significant effect on broadening the impact and visibility of botanical research at national and international levels while providing numerous training and fellowship opportunities.
Vicki was born on November 26, 1947, in Owensboro, Kentucky, to Edwin Joseph Funk and Betty Ann Massenburg Funk. She had two brothers: Edwin Jr. and Jared Kirk Funk. She grew up in Owensboro, except for stays on or near Air Force bases in Virginia, Texas, and Ohio, all of which ended before she started primary school. Vicki studied Biology and History at Murray State University in Kentucky and received her B.S. in 1969. She initially wanted to attend medical school, but decided against it after volunteering at a hospital one summer. After graduating, she lived and worked part-time in Germany for two years and returned to the United States to teach high school for one year. She subsequently spent a summer at the Hancock Biological Station on Kentucky Lake. There she discovered her passion for fieldwork and research. It was hard for her to believe that one could study and work at something so wonderfully engaging.
She entered Murray State University’s graduate program in biology in the fall of 1973. In 1975 she received an M.S. in Biology at Murray State; her thesis was titled, “A Floristic and Geologic Survey of Selected Seeps of Calloway County, KY”. Her advisor was Marian Fuller. She spent the summer of 1975 studying aquatic plants at Stone Lab at Lake Erie. Later that year she entered a Doctorate program at Ohio State University under the direction of Tod Stuessy. During her five years at Ohio State, she spent nearly a year doing field studies in Mexico and Central America, with an additional trip to Colombia for her thesis on the classification of the genus Montanoa. She graduated in 1980. She then spent a postdoctoral year at the New York Botanical Garden with Art Cronquist and became deeply involved in the newly developing field of phylogenetics at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1981 Vicki joined the Smithsonian Institution as Curator of Compositae.
Vicki received many honors and awards acknowledging her career achievements. In 2009 she was presented with two Smithsonian awards: the Secretary's Award for Excellence in Collaboration and the National Museum of Natural History Science Achievement Award. In 2010, she was awarded the Stebbins Medal for the best publication in Plant Systematics or Plant Evolution from the International Association for Plant Taxonomy for the Compositae book. In 2012, she received the Smithsonian's Secretary's Award for Outstanding Publication and was appointed to a 2-year term on the board of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. In 2014 she received the Rolf Dahlgren Prize (in Sweden) for her major contributions to the understanding of the systematics and evolution of the flowering plants (angiosperms). Vicki received the prestigious Asa Gray Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in 2018, which is awarded to individuals who have produced outstanding achievements in the field of plant taxonomy. In 2019, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists announced a new grant named in her honor, funded by the Vicki Funk endowment fund for Graduate Student Research. Most recently she was awarded the Linnean Medal from The Linnean Society. It is bestowed annually as an expression of the Society's esteemed appreciation for service to science. Although Vicki was unable to attend the May meeting in London the current President of the Society, Sandy Knapp, brought the medal to Washington, DC. On what would be one of her final visits to the museum, Vicki was presented with the award on 2 October during a celebration with her peers and friends that strained the capacity of the meeting room.
This video, “Mountains of the Mists,” shows Vicki Funk and other scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History collecting specimens in Neblina, Venezuela in 1984:
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