After a couple of weeks of speculation, the university’s Miller School of Medicine finally confirms what we reported last week - Charles Nemeroff will become chair of the psychiatry department. Not surprisingly, the press release mentions nothing about the controversy surrounding him.

You may recall that Nemeroff, who currently works at Emory University, came to the Senate committee’s attention because he was accepting sizeable consulting fees from Glaxo at the asme that he was the primary investigator on an NIH-funded grant for research into a Glaxo drug (you can read background here and here). Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Repulican who spearheaded the Senate probe, is trying to force universities and the NIH to more aggressively monitor conflicts.

Grassley’s probe prompted Emory to suspend Nemeroff’s work on an NIH grant and asked him to step down as chair of psychiatry while it studied his conduct (look here). And the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General began an inquiry (see this).

In any event, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of the UM medical school, tells The Miami Herald that Nemeroff “an extraordinary psychiatrist and scientist. . . . He got into serious trouble on disclosure on conflict of interest.” He also says he 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.

As for, Nemeroff, 60, he tells the paper that he’s excited to be coming to Miami. “I think it’s going to be a top-10 school.” The psychiatrist also tells the Herald that, in retrospect, he should have declared the drug maker payments but that, at the time, he viewed the university standards as not requiring such revelations since the talks were of an educational nature.

Perhaps not coincidentally, University of Miami president Donna Shalala earlier this week issued an email to faculty reminding them of rules about conflicts of interest and pointed out steps taken to strengthen university procedures, a move that could be interpreted as publicly signaling the school’s desire to avoid trouble and also quell skeptics about the interest in Nemeroff.