Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years. He was chair of their department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and research professor of psychiatry from 2002 until his death in 2007. He helped to found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982.