Chief Research Officer
Chestnut Health Systems
Bloomington, Illinois
Dr. Michael Dennis is the Chief Research Officer at Chestnut Health Systems. He received his PhD in Psychology from Northwestern University under a NIH fellowship to train more methodologists in how to implement and improve the quality of community-based behavioral health research.
Since 1988, he has worked with individuals with OUD on medications for opioid use disorders (MOUD), treatment initiation, retention, readmission, and recovery support and has worked within the community, in a variety of MOUD/other types of treatment, as part of continuum of care studies, and studying and managing long-term recovery over periods of 6 months to 19 years.
Dr. Dennis and his colleagues developed Recovery Management Checkups (RMC) and demonstrated efficacy in five clinical trials and a quasi-experiment to date. He received a MERIT award from NIDA after LI’s first clinical trial and the 2012 Dan Anderson Award for Addiction and Recovery Research for his paper on the main findings from the second trial. He and his colleagues have also worked with economists to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of RMC.
To integrate measurement, clinical research, and practice, Dr. Dennis has also led the development of the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN) family of measures since 1993. As of January 2025, the GAIN Coordinating Center has worked with over 22,685 staff from 5,676 agencies (in all 50 states in the U.S., all 10 provinces of Canada, and 15 other countries). The significance of this work led to Dr. Dennis receiving the International Council on Alcoholism and Addiction (ICAA) lifetime achievement award.
He has been PI, Co-PI, or lead methodologist on a dozen clinical trials, chaired one of NIDA’s data safety monitoring boards, chaired NIAAA’s health services research review group, served on multiple editorial boards, and authored over 350 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
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Supporting ASAM’s Level 1.0 Remission Monitoring through Recovery Management Checkups
Friday, April 24, 2026
3:15 PM - 4:30 PM PT
