Donna Ford-Werntz, Ph.D.

Ford-Werntz' interest in plants germinated during childhood and took root as a high school volunteer in the University of Cincinnati herbarium. She studied botany in college, focused on plant systematics, with major fieldwork in Chile. Her current faculty role is WVU Herbarium Specialist, where extensive curatorial tasks have flourished under her direction, blossoming as a computer database of West Virginia specimen labels. Ford-Werntz co-authored the Checklist and Atlas of Vascular Flora of West Virginia and the West Virginia FloraID software program. She has brought to fruition various funded projects, including West Virginia floristic research and WVU Herbarium digitization.