Mitrofanov, Pavel Ilyich

Born on June 21 ( July 3 ), 1857 in Arkhangelsk in the family of an official. In 1877 he graduated from the Arkhangelsk Gymnasium with a gold medal and in the same year was enrolled in the natural sciences department of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Imperial Moscow University . He graduated in 1881, after which he worked as a teacher in Moscow.

Since 1886 - privat-docent . Since 1896 - professor at the Imperial University of Warsaw ^[1] .

In 1915, after the outbreak of World War I , the University of Warsaw was evacuated first to Moscow and then to Rostov-on-Don . Mitrofanov preferred to respond to the proposal of the Samara provincial leader of the nobility A.N. Naumov to head the newly formed Samara Polytechnic (now Samara State Technical University ), although he also remained the head of the Department of Comparative Anatomy, Histology and Embryology and headed the zootomy laboratory and zoological office at the moved Warsaw.

July 1, 1915 he moved to Samara and immediately transgressed to the duties of the head of the Samara Polytechnic. Since he was also an employee of the university in Rostov-on-Don, he very often had to make long trips between the two cities, although Rostov became his main place of residence ^{[1] [2]} .

On September 1, 1917, his term of office of the rector of the Samara Polytechnic expired and he was immediately again seconded to the newly formed Don University . For a short time as the rector of the Samara university, he carried out a large amount of preparatory work for the organization of the institute. In particular, the construction commission regularly gathered and resolved issues on the agenda: on the use of donated money, on the allocation of land to the institute, and on the choice of an architect. Although he did not succeed in embarking on the direct construction of the Institute’s buildings because of the war and revolution .

He became the last elected rector of the Don University. The Volunteer Army Relief Society was established under him, and the wife of Professor E. E. Mitrofanov led the Rostov branch of the White Cross, which arose from a women's circle.

In the last years of his life he was almost completely blind. He died on December 29, 1920. “He died in his laboratory, where he recently lived in complete solitude and under extremely adverse conditions of food and heating, ” - Professor J. Schelkanovtsev wrote in an obituary ^[1] .

Scientific work

He was the author of about 110 scientific papers ^[3] . He studied the development of peripheral nerves and their endings and comparative embryological studies of birds. He also studied teratology , including experimental research, and gave a correct explanation of the causes of a number of physiological anomalies ^[4] .