Nikolai Vasilyevich Parin (21 November 1932 – 18 April 2012) was a Soviet and Russian

ichthyologist Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish ( Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of Octobe ...

, specializing in oceanic pelagic fish. He headed the Laboratory of Oceanic Ichthyofauna at the RAS Institute of Oceanology in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

, where he ended his career as a Professor after more than fifty-seven years. In his career, he described more than 150 new taxa of fish and participated in 20 major oceanic expeditions. Thirty-six species of fish are named in his honour.

Personal life

Parin was born in

Perm Perm or PERM may refer to: Places *Perm, Russia, a city in Russia ** Permsky District, the district **Perm Krai, a federal subject of Russia since 2005 **Perm Oblast, a former federal subject of Russia 1938–2005 **Perm Governorate, an administra ...

on 21 November 1932. His father was Vasily Vasilevich Parin, who was the founder and first Secretary General of the USSR Academy of Medicine but later was made politically suspect due to a trip to the United States and a dispute with

Trofim Lysenko Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (russian: Трофим Денисович Лысенко, uk, Трохи́м Дени́сович Лисе́нко, ; 20 November 1976) was a Soviet agronomist and Pseudoscience, pseudo-scientist.''An ill-educated agro ...

. After the death of

Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...

in 1953 and rise of

Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Premier of the Soviet Union, chairm ...

, his father was rehabilitated and played a key medical role in the

Soviet space program The Soviet space program (russian: Космическая программа СССР, Kosmicheskaya programma SSSR) was the national space program of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), active from 1955 until the dissoluti ...

. Because of his father's imprisonment, Parin could not study physics at

Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...

, as he originally had intended and instead studied fisheries in

. He met his wife Olga in 1963 and married her in 1966. He had one son and two grandchildren. His son, Nick Jr., has published a number of papers on fossil fish.

Career

His primary interest was in the

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

of oceanic fish, though interests in his long career later expanded to include the fish of the deep-water pelagic and the bottom-dwelling fish of coastal slopes and deep-water uprises. Parin graduated with honours from the Moscow Institute of Fisheries in 1955 and shortly after began his life-long career at the P. P Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. He worked as a technician on the ''Vityav'' in Vladivostok until returning to complete his PhD on Exocoetidae and Oxyporhamphidae in 1961. His advisor was Theodore S. Rass. He later received a Doctor of Science for his work on the fish of the oceanic epipelagic in 1968, supervised by A. Andriashev and G. Lindberg. He served as editor-in-chief of the Voprosy Ikhtiologii, Russia's leading journal of ichyology, from 1988 to 2010. He was elected as a corresponding member to the

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across t ...

in 1994 and later was awarded the Leo S. Berg Gold Medal in 2000 for his work. He won the

USSR State Prize The USSR State Prize (russian: links=no, Государственная премия СССР, Gosudarstvennaya premiya SSSR) was the Soviet Union's state honor. It was established on 9 September 1966. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, t ...

for his monograph on the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

. He was also elected as foreign member of the

American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists The American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) is an international learned society devoted to the scientific studies of ichthyology (study of fish) and herpetology (study of reptiles and amphibians). The primary emphases of the ...

and as Vice President of the European Ichthyological Society.

Taxon described by him

*See :Taxa named by Nikolai Vasilyevich Parin

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Parin, Nikolai 1932_births 2012_deaths Corresponding_Members_of_the_Russian_Academy_of_Sciences Soviet_ichthyologists Russian_ichthyologists Recipients_of_the_USSR_State_Prize