Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, has been named chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami.

Last year Nemeroff, as the top psychiatrist at Emory University, was the focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the millions 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 exceptional psychiatrist and an exceptional scientist who has one issue in which he recognizes he made a mistake,'' in not telling Emory how much he was getting from drug makers.

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

Elsewhere, opinions are divided.

The former head of psychiatry at Duke University told The Miami Herald Thursday that Nemeroff was ``economical with the truth'' and his work can't be trusted, while the leader of the Columbia University psychiatry program said Nemeroff was a top-flight scientist and he had never seen any bias in his work.

For his own part, Nemeroff, 60, said he was excited to be coming to Miami. ``I think it's going to be a top-10 school.''

PAYMENT DISCLOSURE

Nemeroff's appointment comes at a time when healthcare reform bills in both the House and Senate have sections requiring healthcare providers to publicly reveal their payments to doctors.

In October 2008, the psychiatrist's activities made the front page of The New York Times after Grassley investigators found that Nemeroff -- ``one of the nation's most influential psychiatrists,'' according to The Times -- 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 Emory.

Based on Grassley's complaints, Nemeroff's work on a mayor NIH grant was suspended and Emery asked him to step down as chair of psychiatry while it studied his conduct.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services had launched an investigation into Nemeroff's activities. An OIG spokesman said it never confirms nor denies investigations. Nemeroff said he knew nothing about OIG looking at him.

According to published reports, the psychiatrist received between $800,000 to $1.2 million from GlaxoSmithKline while leading a major study into mood disorder drugs, including ones made by GSK.

Nemeroff said Thursday that the news reports had not made clear that his talks were on GSK drugs now on the market, while his research funded by NIH involved basic lab studies of GSK chemical compounds that were years away from market. That work did not promote GSK products, he told The Herald.

`SCIENCE PIMPING'

But Bernard Carroll, former head of psychiatry at Duke University and once Nemeroff's boss, said parts of Nemeroff's work involved Paxil, a GSK antidepressant. ``Basically, he was doing basic science pimping for Paxil to produce talking points,'' Carroll told The Herald in an e-mail Thursday. ``All he ever produced was speculation but that was enough to satisfy Glaxo marketing. . . . I have been exposing his shenanigans for some years.''