About Lighthouse Institute

Quality Research Since 1986

After several years as a National Institute on Drug Abuse workforce development trainer, one of Chestnut Health Systems’ founders, Bill White, returned to Chestnut to found the Lighthouse Institute (LI) in 1986. Today, Lighthouse does investigator-initiated community-based research, leads program evaluations for community partners, and operates training centers on evidence-based practices for the field, including clinical practice agencies across the United States, Canada, and in more than a dozen other countries. With more than 110 employees, Lighthouse operates out of three main offices in Bloomington and Chicago, IL and Eugene, OR and has remote staff in 23 states throughout the United States.

Lighthouse is particularly interested in understanding and addressing addiction over the life course, including working with youth, chronic-care models, and supporting recovery. The scientists and staff include those with lived experience with substance use disorders and legal and welfare systems involvement.

Lighthouse is known for its implementation, high rates of recruitment and follow-up, use of service cascades, and advanced analytic methods such as longitudinal and mixed methods analysis.

Lighthouse is a research institute housed within a community-based organization. Lighthouse focuses on substance use, mental health, and integrated health services, implementation and evaluation research, and how patients intersect with various points of the public systems including but not limited to public health, criminal justice, and child welfare. The mission is to help communities and practitioners improve the quality of services through research, program evaluation, training, and publishing to advance understanding of achievement of health equity and social justice.

Since inception, Lighthouse has conducted more than 70 rigorous research projects, as well as evaluations including:

• Five major longitudinal studies spanning two to 19 years
• 19 clinical trials of substance use interventions
• 18 coordinating centers working with four to 178 sites
• Eight national surveys on topics of opioid-related services and needs, best practices, and substance use and mental health services in the justice system and community supervision programs.

Interested in joining our team? Check out the current open positions at Lighthouse Institute!

For a printable description about Lighthouse, the work we do, and our featured programs, please click here.