American botanist. Vicki Funk is a curator and senior research scientist in the United States National Herbarium at the Smithsonian Institution and adjunct professor at George Mason and Duke Universities. Since 1988 she has headed the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield program (BDG). As a specialist on the Compositae family, she has focused her research on the evolution and biogeography of plants of the South American highlands. She has collected over 12,000 numbers, starting in 1976, during extensive field work in Central and South America and on shorter trips in other parts of the world. Most of her expeditions have been to areas about which very little is known; a few, such as the work at Volcan Arenal in Costa Rica and at Tambopata Nature Reserve in Peru, were site-specific; on more recent expeditions, material was collected for DNA analysis as well as morphological studies.

A graduate in history and biology from Murray State University, she worked as a high school teacher in Kentucky and as an instructor in Project Apollo before completing a master's degree in biology in 1975. In 1980 she was awarded a PhD from Ohio State University for a study of the systematics of Montanoa Cerv. (Asteraceae), after which she joined the staff of the Smithsonian Institution, initially as an assistant curator. She was a visiting curator at Kew (1991-1994) and a visiting academic at the University of Queensland (2001-2003). She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, Asociación Latinoamericana de Botánica, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, the Botanical Society of America, the Commission for Flora Neotropica , the Explorers Club, the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, the International Biogeography Society, the Linnean Society of London, Sociedad Botanica de Mexico, the Society of Australian Systematic Biologists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, the Southern African Society of Systematic Biology, Species Plantarum, the Systematics Association, the Washington Field Biologists Club, and the Willi Hennig Society.