Shrenk Leopold Ivanovich 
(24.04(06.05).1826 – 08(20).01.1894)

Russian zoologist, ethnographer and geographer, researcher of the Far East, academician. 
Born on the estate of Khiten, Sumy district, Kharkiv province, in the family of a landowner. He received his primary education in a private boarding school in Moscow, and a higher education at the University of Dorpat, which he graduated in 1850, having defended his thesis for a master's degree. Following two years after graduation, Schrenk raised his education in Germany, receiving his Ph.D. from the Prussian Albertine Academy. 
Returning from Germany, Schrenk decided to get a job at the Russian Academy of Sciences. As a condition of admission, he was asked to go as a naturalist to a sea expedition to Kamchatka and Russian America. 
In July 1853 Shrenk and his two assistants sailed on the frigate Aurora from Kronstadt and through England, Brazil, Cape Horn arrived in Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka. From here on the corvette "Olivutsa" the expedition rounded Sakhalin from the south and reached the  De-Kastri Bay. Peres on the schooner "Vostok", passed with a detailed survey of the coast to the mouth of the Amur, entered it and landed in Nikolaevsk. 
In the spring of 1855 Shrenk set off up the Amur, conducting detailed geographical, zoological, and ethnographic research. Having reached the mouth of the Ussuri, Shrenk climbed along it to the mouth of the Khor river, and returned to Nikolayevsk in the late autumn. As in the first winter, Shrenk made excursions to Sakhalin. 
In the spring of 1856, Shrenk, together with the botanist K.I. Maksimovich went to Petersburg, which after the hardest journey reached only in January 1857. 
The expedition brought the richest scientific material: diaries, maps, ornithological, zoological and botanical collections, processed by Schrenk himself, meteorological, oceanographic observations. The data on the history and life of local ethnic groups, linguistic materials on the basis of which dictionaries of local languages were compiled had great value. 
For research conducted on the Amur, and capital work "Essay on the physical geography of the north of the Sea of Japan" Shrenk in 1869 was awarded the Konstantinovsky medal - the highest award of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. 
Upon returning from Amur, Shrenk devoted himself to teaching, research and administrative activities. In 1863 he was elected an extraordinary, and in 186-5 an ordinary academician in the department of zoology. 
In addition to working at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Shrenk lectured on geography at the Academy of the General Staff, and since 1879 at the Maritime Academy.
In 1870 Shrenk, along with G.I. Wild, A.I. Voeikov, M.A. Rykachev and other scientists initiated the establishment of the meteorological commission of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Schrenk’s contribution to the preparation and organization of the I International Polar Year is great. He was one of the initiators of the organization in 1885–1886. expeditions A.A. Bunge to the Novosibirsk Islands.

In 1879 by the decision of the State Council, approved by the emperor, a museum of anthropology and ethnography was established in St. Petersburg on the basis of the former Kunstkamera, the first director of which was L.I. Shrenk - one of the initiators of the creation of this museum. Huge efforts were made by Schrenk to obtain new museum areas, without which it was impossible to develop a museum, build exhibitions, finance, replenish with new collections, open a museum for the general public, organize the protection of ethnographic, anthropological and archaeological objects, etc. Ten years later, the museum corresponded to the best examples of similar institutions in Western Europe.

He died in St. Petersburg. According to a report on the death, published in the newspaper Novoye Vremya on January 11, 1894, “after the funeral service in the Lutheran Church of St. Catherine on Vasilyevsky Island, the body will be taken to the Baltic Station”. Apparently buried in Dorpat. 
Islands near the island Rykachev in the Kara Sea. Named by Russian Polar Expedition in 1900.

River in the west of Taimyr.