He is the Bonner-Lowry Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine (USA). He served as the Director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) from 2024 to 2025, continuing Ian Stevenson's pioneering research on children who claim to remember past lives. He is the author of two influential books that together have been translated into twenty languages, “Life before life” (2005) and “Return to life: Extraordinary cases of children who remember past lives” (2013), a New York Times bestseller.
He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (USA), graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in Psychology in 1982, followed by earning his Medical degree four years later.
He then completed a residency in general psychiatry and a fellowship in child psychiatry at the University of Virginia. After a stint in private practice, he returned to UVA in 2000, where, in addition to his teaching responsibilities, he served as the Medical Director of the UVA Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic for nine years.