Rick Borchelt

Broader Impacts Champion

Principal

Canebrake Communications LLC

Borchelt is being honored because of his role in supporting and advancing the broader impacts of research while at the Department of Energy and for his pivotal role in the SciPEP initiative.

Rick Borchelt retired in 2023 after 10 years as director of communications and public affairs and senior advisor to the director for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. A long-time science communicator who started out as a biologist/naturalist, he has spent most of his career communicating and advocating for science funding and science policy.  Borchelt has held numerous high-level communications positions, most recently as special assistant for public affairs in the Office of the Director at the National Cancer Institute. He served as executive communications director for the Pew-funded Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University and as communications director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research, Education, and Economics Mission Area.

Borchelt also has directed media relations for the National Academy of Sciences, acted as press secretary for the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee, and was special assistant for public affairs in the Executive Office of the President during the Clinton administration.  He has worked overseas as well. He spent time in Nairobi, Kenya, as executive speechwriter to the United Nations under the secretary general and executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He’s worked for universities (U of MD College Park, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, MIT), government agencies (Smithsonian, USIA, NASA, NIH, USDA), industry (Lockheed Martin), the National Academy of Sciences, The White House, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Borchelt received a bachelor’s degree in science (botany/plant biology) from Southeast Missouri State University. He’s still an avid birder and field botanist and maintains an active field project monitoring threatened and endangered butterfly species. He’s also the co-lead of the joint Kavli Foundation/DOE project, the Science Public Engagement Partnership (SciPEP), focused on providing scientists with the confidence, efficacy, and tools to engage the public around basic science.