About Us

The Midwest Lighting Institute was founded by Rodney Heller of Energy Performance Lighting (EPL), to test some of the benefits seen in his lighting upgrade work into official peer-reviewed studies.  Over the nearly 20 years of performing energy-efficiency lighting retrofits at EPL, Rodney became interested in the science of lighting and more specifically, interactions that happen between light and human beings in their everyday lives. As his interest in the human physiological response to light became more prevalent, he began implementing some of the research into his projects, which yielded positive results for EPL’s customers. These experiences led him to the conclusion that more research was needed to do full-scale applications of lighting, and he formed the Midwest Lighting Institute (MLI) to address this need. 

As a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, MLI fulfills the need to evaluate how lighting affects human performance through expanded research, whether that performance metric is measured as fewer medical errors in a hospital, fewer falls in nursing homes, or improved performance of third shift workers for NASA. The common theme of this work is to optimize lighting performance for humans through the research performed at MLI, using the latest technologies for energy savings and control strategies through the expertise at EPL.