Meet Thomas Panek, the New Lighthouse Guild CEO

Posted by AbleNews, By Emily Ladau

Congratulations on becoming the new CEO of Lighthouse Guild! Can you share more with us about your journey leading up to this new endeavor?

For the past 10 years, I was President and CEO of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a guide dog school in New York. And prior to that, I was in the Foreign Commercial Service. I was trained as a diplomat in international trade, and that was my career until I became Vice President of Industries for the Blind.

I am a person who’s lost my vision. As a boy, the stars in the night sky started disappearing. Slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle losing its pieces, the world faded from view, and for a long time I kept it to myself and tried to adapt. One day, when I was a teenager, I went to a low vision clinic at a Lighthouse Guild, and I was told that I would lose my vision. It was the start of a very different journey for me. Now, it’s full circle to be in this new role. I am able to help others who find themselves on that path to attain their dreams. It’s a true privilege to be sitting in this seat, 25 years after sitting in the seat of discovering that I would be going blind.

Your new role is particularly noteworthy, as you are the first Lighthouse Guild CEO with a vision impairment. Why is it so important for people with disabilities to be in leadership roles in our communities?

To the best of my knowledge, I’m the first person with the lived experience of being visually impaired to sit in this seat. From the disability community perspective, I think that’s something we’ve wanted collectively for a long time. Here we are in 2025, with more representation in leadership. But it’s important to me to underscore that the board and the leadership of Lighthouse Guild did not select me because I am visually impaired, but rather because I was the most highly qualified candidate. I think one thing that we need to do as a community is to help each other find the mentoring, educational experience, and opportunities so that we can get to the place where we’re the most highly qualified candidates for the job, disabled or not.

You’ve been quite invested in accessible technology innovation. Can you tell us about your work, especially with artificial intelligence?

Like anybody who’s living every day with a disability, I have moments of frustration when I’m facing an obstacle, and I get a little bit of a thrill from finding a way to work around it. For example, I’m a runner, and I have people who guide me, so I’m dependent on those people. But sometimes, the guide doesn’t show up, and I can’t run. So, I started a running guides program where dogs are trained to run. But not all dogs can run long distances, and not everybody has access to a guide dog. And during the pandemic, you couldn’t be within six feet of anybody, so how would I tether to a guide to help me run? I worked on a concept where, using artificial intelligence with a smartphone, I was able to navigate through Central Park by drawing a line through the park and my phone would essentially tell me where I was relative to that line, left, right, and whether there was an obstacle ahead of me.

We can use AI to help us with some of these very human problems that we face. I aim to converge the resources of our community into some lightning-fast development in this space. I know great things are coming, and stay tuned, because I hope to break some new records with the Lighthouse Guild team, and find what can be done with this technology, not just for the visually impaired, but beyond.

What disability rights issue is your biggest advocacy priority right now?

One of my main priorities has been and continues to be employment. Leading by example is incredibly important for me. Another is mobility and making sure that people have access. And the biggest priority for me is access to generative AI. We have to be very thoughtful and be part of that conversation with developers as they build, so that they’re thinking about the disability community from the beginning rather than in retrospect.

Thinking ahead, what’s next on your exciting journey with Lighthouse Guild?

I would say mobility, health and well-being, and technology advancements are really where I’m going to focus my time. I get to work with the leadership team to drive innovation around what’s next in these realms and I’m so optimistic about being in this role. It’s a position of collaboration, it’s a position where I’m able to bring people together, and I think that’s important. I know that we, as a community, can have disagreements or differences, and I think discourse is important, but it’s also important for us to all pull together.