John M. Silva, Ph.D. is a professor of sport psychology in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, and the M.S. and B.S. from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Silva was the founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP), currently the largest sport psychology association in the world, and was the inaugural editor of the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, the first nonproprietary sport psychology journal in the United States. He is co-editor of two sport psychology textbooks, including the widely used Psychological Foundations of Sport published in 2002, and is a fellow in AAASP, a certified AAASP consultant, a member of the APA, the USOC Sport Psychology Registry, and a Research Consortium Fellow.

A faculty member at Chapel Hill since 1981, Dr. Silva has served as the director of the sport psychology graduate program and director of the sport psychology laboratory. Dedicated to the development of students, he formed three sport psychology clinics as part of the sport psychology graduate training program at Carolina. These directly supervised clinics provided master's students with hands-on counseling experiences with collegiate athletes. Dr. Silva has served as a sport psychology consultant for athletes and teams for over 25 years. He has provided consultation and on-site services to athlete's competing in national, international, and world competitions. Discussion of his work and research has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, NCAA News, USA Today,and The Chronicle of Higher Education, in several national wire releases, and on national television. Invited lectures include the 1984 Los Angeles Games Olympic Scientific Congress, the 1985 World Sport Psychology Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, a series of invited lectures in 1985 in Sweden, the 1988 Olympic Scientific Congress in Seoul, South Korea, lectures at East German and Soviet sport psychology institutes in 1989, a 1990 address to the Spanish Olympic Organizing Committee and National Governing Bodies in Madrid, Spain, a 1995 keynote at the International Congress for Sport Science in Komotini, Greece, a 1999 invited address in Osaka, Japan, and numerous invited addresses at sport psychology conferences including the Coleman Griffith Memorial Lecture at AAASP in 1995 and an invited presentation on the future of sport psychology at the AAASP 20th Anniversary Conference in 2005.

In 2000 he was elected to the USA Team Handball Board of Directors and has served on its Sports Medicine Committee since 1987. From 1995 to the present he has chaired or co-chaired the USA Team Handball Sport Science and Technology Committee. Dr. Silva has coached over a dozen Carolina students who have become USA Team Handball National Team players including two members of the 1996 USA Team Handball Olympic team. He coached the Women's South Team in the 1993 Olympic Festival and the Men's South Team, which won the Gold Medal in the 1995 Olympic Festival. In December 2003 he was awarded the USOC, USA Team Handball Volunteer Coach of the Year Award. In 2004, 2005, and 2006 he coached Carolina Team Handball men's team to three consecutive USA Team Handball Collegiate National Championships.