Russian botanist in Tomsk, the Caucasus and St. Petersburg, where he was director of the Komarov Botanical Institute. Boris Schischkin, the son of local school teacher, studied medicine at the University of Tomsk in Siberia between 1906 and 1911. Interested in the flora of Siberia he began to study plants in the Altai Mountains and the Tuva region, conducting a botanical expedition through east Kazakhstan during 1912-1914. Serving as a medical officer during the First World War, Schischkin was sent to Transcaucasia, taking every opportunity between 1915 and 1917 to study the plants of Armenia and the historic region of Lazistan in Turkey. Following this he worked for several years as a botanist in the herbarium of the Museum of Georgia in Tbilisi, studying and collecting the flora of this region and producing a 16 fascicle Plantae orientales exsiccatae (1924-1928).

Returning to Tomsk in 1925 he was named professor at his alma mater and began to focus his attention on the plants of Siberia, working on the Flora of Western Siberia which was published between 1927 and 1949. From 1931, however, Schischkin had been working at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg (now known as the Komarov Botanical Institute), as a senior botanist in their herbarium. He started contributing to the Flora SSSR project and was largely responsible for the Caryophyllaceae and Umbelliferae sections. In 1938 Schischkin became director of the Botanical Institute and saw it through the Second World War, in which a great deal of damage was done. From 1945 he was also at the head of the Department of Taxonomy and Geography of Vascular Plants and took over editorial responsibilities for the Flora SSSR. Schischkin also edited the journal Sovietskaja Botanica (1938-1945) and from 1948 was on the editorial board for the Botanical Journal of the Russian Botanical Society.

Sources:
E.G. Bobrov, 1963, "Boris K. Schischkin", Taxon, 12(8): 273-276
S.G. Shetler, 1967, The Komarov Botanical Institute.