Ian Stevenson, M.D. is Director, Division of Personality Studies and Carlson Professor of Psychiatry, both a part of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a researcher in the study of reincarnation as well as being the leading scientist studying children who claim to remember previous lives.

he has written a number of books including Unlearned Language:
New Studies in Xenoglossy. This book examines two cases where people speak a language that he or she has not learned normally, in childhood or later. The major part of the book is devoted to lengthy reports of the two cases. Transcripts of tape recordings provide evidence that the subjects could speak the foreign language intelligently and were not just repeating a few phrases of a language that they may have learned casually in some other way. The results of extensive inquiries into the possibility that either subject might have learned normally in early life the foreign language he spoke in childhood were negative in each case.

another book by Stephenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, examines cases when children remember past lives, call out for relatives (in their past life) by name, and recognize their old past-life neighborhoods. Stevenson has always been careful to say his work is only "suggestive of reincarnation".