John Dorschner
The Miami Herald
November 5, 2009

Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, is being named chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami medical school.

Last year Nemeroff, as chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University, was the intense focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the money the psychiatrist received from drug companies while conducting supposedly unbiased research for the National Institutes of Health on drugs made by the companies he was receiving money from.

On Thursday, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of UM medical school, called Nemeroff “an extraordinary psychiatrist and scientist. . . . He got into serious trouble on disclosure on conflict of interest.”

Goldschmidt said he had read investigative reports from Emory about Nemeroff’s activities and found nothing to indicate that payments the psychiatrist received had in any way influenced his research results.

In a telephone interview at mid-day Thursday, Nemeroff, 60, told The Miami Herald he was excited to be coming to Miami. “I think it’s going to be a top-10 school.”

A front-page report by The New York Times in October 2008 said that congressional investigators found Nemeroff — “one of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists” — had received $2.8 million in consulting deals with drug makers over seven years and failed to report at least $1.2 million of that to Emery University.

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