Joseph Piven is the Thomas E. Castelloe Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his MD from the University of Maryland and completed residency training in Adult and Child Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He went on to pursue post-residency training in Child Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London under Michael Rutter, MD, followed by a fellowship at Johns Hopkins focused on the genetics of neurobehavioral disorders and brain imaging.

After spending a decade in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa, Piven joined the University of North Carolina, where he was named Professor of Psychiatry. He later became the founding Director of the Carolina Institute of Developmental Disabilities. His research focuses on genetic risk factors for autism spectrum disorders and their early manifestations in the brain. He has published more than 300 scientific articles and chapters.