Renowned psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff stepped down from his position as chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University on Friday (Oct. 3) amid accusations that he's failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in pharmaceutical company payouts while receiving millions of dollars in federal research funding.

Nemeroff's apparent lack of disclosure is being probed by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) from his perch as the ranking Republican in the Senate Finance Committee. Following the psychiatrist's departure, Emory University officials told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the weekend that the school is launching its own investigation into Nemeroff's activities.

In a letter sent to Emory president James Wagner last week, Grassley outlined discrepancies in Nemeroff's disclosure reports to the university. From 2003 - 2008, as Nemeroff served as principal investigator on a multi-million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to study five GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) antidepressants, the psychiatrist was paid - and failed to report to Emory - more than $100,000 to give promotional talks on the company's products. Grassley wrote that "in 2003 GSK paid Dr. Nemeroff about $119,000 in speaking fees and expenses. Based upon information provided from Emory, Dr. Nemeroff did not report that he was giving promotional talks for GSK on Paxil and Lamictal."

Grassley also pointed out that in 2004, Emory's own conflict of interest committee reprimanded Nemeroff for failing to report earnings from GSK. Emory and NIH policies state that researchers must report potentially conflicting financial ties to industry that total $10,000 per year or more. Nemeroff told the committee that he would adhere to the policy in the future, wrote Grassley.

Shortly after making this promise, however, Nemeroff was back on the promotional circuit for GSK, giving two talks for the company for a fee greater than $10,000, according to Grassley's letter.

In 2006, Nemeroff quit as the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychopharmacology after coming under fire for failing to disclose financial ties to a device company whose products he reviewed favorably in the journal. Before that, in 2003, Nemeroff and an Emory colleague took heat for publishing a paper in Nature Neuroscience that praised a trio of products to treat mood disorders, while failing to mention that the two had significant financial stakes in the products.

"There were serious allegations in the past, and now there are even more allegations. And we are investigating," Emory University executive vice president of academic affairs, Earl Lewis, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lewis also told the AJC that Nemeroff could be fired from Emory depending on the outcome of the university's investigation.

Check out a detailed timeline of Nemeroff's alleged indiscretions over at the Pharmalot blog.