Ivan Nikolaevich Filipjev, one of the founders of modern nematology and a prominent Russian nematologist, was born on May 1889 In Petersburg.
        Early in life he showed an interest for natural history.  As a child he was fond of collecting insects.  This interest lasted all his life: his work on nematodes being combined with entomology.  Filipjev entered Petersburg University in 1906 and graduated with honors in 1910.
        In summer 1909, a year before graduation, he worked at the Naples Zoological Station and, in 1911, at the Biological Station in Villafranka, collecting nematodes and on other marine animals.  His first paper, devoted to the Macrolepidoptera of the Novgorod region, was published in 1910.  His second appeared in the same year under headline "Zur Organisation von Tocophyra quadripartita" (Arch. Protistenkunde, Bd. 21: 117-142, 1910).  Later he turned to nematology and began by investigating the nervous system of marine nematodes on the genus Oncholaimus (Travaux de la Societe Imperiale des Naturalistes de St.-Petersbourg, Bd. 43, L. 1: 205-222, 1912).
        Although all his subsequent scientific work was on nematodes, he never neglected insects and published works on ecology, biogeography and evolution.  His fundamental work on free-living nematodes (Free-living nematodes of the Sevastopol area) was done during 1912-1913 and he took his M.Sc., degree on February 12, 1923.
        Filipjev worked at different research and educational institutions in the Soviet Union.  He began teaching during his student years and while still an undergraduate he lectured on biology at a Medical Institute.
Filipjev spent most of his life in Leningrad where he worked at the All-Union Institute of Plant Protection, at the University and at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
        He traveled widely throughout Russia revealing centres where agricultural plants were damaged by nematodes and collecting scientific specimens. In Summer 1928, he took part in the International Entomological Congress in Ithaca, USA, where he became acquainted with the works of American nematologists and with Cobb's Laboratory in particular.  On his way to America, Filipjev visited research institutions in Germany and Britain.
        Filipjev's scientific standing was high in his motherland and abroad.  He was a member of the Helminthological Society of Washington, the American Society of Applied Entomologists, the French Entomological Society, the French Society of Vegetable Pathology.
Filipjev spent the last days of his life in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.  He had been moved there on May 26, 1933 to the Zoological Department of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences which was being created at that time.  There he was engaged on the questions of agricultural entomology and nematology but also devoted much time to free-living nematodes of the Arctic Ocean, processing plentiful material collected earlier.  The paper on this material was published posthumously (Proceedings of the Driffing Expedition on Icebreaker "Sedov"; Moscow, Vol. 3: 158-184, 1946- in Russia).
         Scientific papers published by Filipjev exceed fifty; forty were devoted to nematodes.  He described more then 160 new species and about twenty genera and created new systems of classification, and developed new methods of investigating plant nematodes.
Filipjev died in Alma-Ata on the 22 of October 1940 during the difficult times of the prewar period.  Both his sons also perished early in the War.
Filipjev had a resolute and purposeful nature.  He showed good will to friends and colleges but was uncompomising and sarcastic with his scientific opponents.  His outstanding memory helped him to master new foreign languages, and to memorize quickly the topography of the new cities he happened to visit.  However, when preoccupied by a new theoretical concept he became absentminded and forgetful.  There were occasions when he bought tickets twice for the same train or took his watch for repair when he had merely forgotten to wind it.
Filipjev lived a short hard life but he created a new scientific school in Russia - nematology.  Filipjev is regarded as the scientific leader and teacher of Soviet nematologists who are now numbered in hundreds.