Vicki Funk  Vicki Ann Funk (November 26, 1947 – October 22, 2019) was a Senior Research Botanist and Curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, known for her work on members of the composite family (Asteraceae) including collecting plants in many parts of the world, as well as her synthetic work on phylogenetics and biogeography.[1][2][3]  Funk 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, and a few Air Force bases before she was in elementary school. Funk studied Biology and History at Murray State University in Kentucky and received her B.S. in 1969. She had 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 then spent a summer at the Hancock Biological Station on Kentucky Lake. There she discovered her passion for field work and research. In 1975 she received an M.S. in Biology at Murray State where her thesis was "A Floristic and Geologic Survey of Selected Seeps of Calloway County, KY". Her advisor was Dr. Marian Fuller. She spent the summer of 1975 studying aquatic plants at Stone Lab at Lake Erie. In the fall she started a PhD program at Ohio State University with Ron Stuckey as her advisor. She later changed her studies to Compositae with Tod Stuessy. She was an assistant curator at the Ohio State University from 1976 until 1977. In 1980, she graduated from the Ohio State University with a Ph.D. writing her thesis on "The Systematics of Montanoa Cerv. (Asteraceae)," which was published in 1982 in the "Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden". In 1981 she spent a postdoctoral year at the New York Botanical Garden[5] where she studied Compositae with Art Cronquist and the newly developing field of phylogenetics at the American Museum of Natural History. Funk was appointed as a research scientist and curator at the US National Herbarium of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in 1981. In 1986 she published "A Phylogenetic analysis of the Orchidaceae" (Smithsonian Institution Press) with Dr. . In 2004 she became a Senior Research Scientist and Curator of Compositae at the US National Herbarium Department of Botany.