Profile · Wausau, Wisconsin
Ronald Terrance Borchardt
Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist; longtime University of Kansas professor and chair; died Lawrence, Kansas, 2025
$2 million
Ronald Terrance Borchardt was the Wausau-born pharmaceutical chemist who spent nearly fifty years at the University of Kansas figuring out how drugs cross gut and brain barriers, how peptides survive a bottle, and how to block an enzyme viruses need. Colleagues called him a giant in the pharmaceutical sciences; he liked to say, Sinatra-style, that he did it his way. Born in Wausau on February 18, 1944, he grew up in a working-class house where Helen worked the lunchroom at a middle school and Martin worked in a factory. Both parents had stopped at grade school and still pushed education on Ron and his sister Judi. He was a B–C student who preferred the ice rink and baseball and failed to make the basketball team; Coach Marshall Taylor, who took Wausau to the 1960 state title, made him manager instead and taught him how to run a room. After graduation he loaded bags of roofing granules onto rail cars. That factory summer, not a guidance counselor, decided college. Organic chemistry at Wisconsin turned a future pharmacist into a scientist. He earned a Ph.D. at Kansas in 1970 on the stereochemistry of the adrenergic system, completed an NIH postdoc, and returned to KU for nearly five decades as Solon E. Summerfield Distinguished Professor, fifteen years as chair of pharmaceutical chemistry, and two as acting dean. About 170 graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists passed through his lab. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, on July 15, 2025. The Wausau boy who was never the prospect became the reason other people’s drugs actually work.