Former UVM professor charged with research fraud
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By Lisa Rathke Associated Press - Published: March 18, 2005
BURLINGTON — A former professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine was charged Thursday with fabricating data to win thousands of dollars in research grants.
Eric T. Poehlman, 49, has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of making false statements in an application for a $542,000 grant he received.
Poehlman has also agreed to pay $180,000 to settle a civil complaint related to the numerous false grant applications and articles he had filed while at UVM. Poehlman, who holds a doctorate, will also pay $16,000 in legal fees to the research assistant whose complaint about Poehlman prompted investigations by the university and federal officials.
"Dr. Poehlman fraudulently diverted millions of dollars from Public Health Service to support his research projects," U.S. Attorney David V. Kirby said Thursday. "This in turn siphoned millions of dollars from the pool of resources available for valid scientific research proposals. As this prosecution provides, such conduct will not be tolerated."
Poehlman faces up to five years in prison on the criminal charges. He's also barred from receiving Public Health Research funds and must retract or correct 10 articles.
From 1987 to 2001 Poehlman held various research positions at the UVM College of Medicine and at the University of Maryland in Baltimore.
He is accused of filing 17 research grant applications and requesting $11.6 million in federal funding using false data.
Although he did not receive many of the grants, the National Institutes of Health and the USDA used $2.9 million in research funding based on the faulty applications, the U.S. attorney's office said.
Poehlman changed and made up research in applications and papers on the effect of menopause on women's metabolism, the impact of aging on older men and women, the impact of hormone replacement therapy on obesity in post-menopausal women, the study of metabolism in Alzheimer's patients and the effect of endurance training on metabolism.
Letters of retraction will be sent to all remaining journals where falsified data had been published, said Frances Carr, UVM's vice president for research.
"From the UVM perspective, the integrity of research and scholarship is a fundamental value for us," she said. The university pursued allegations of inconsistencies in data and had a system in place to bring about this outcome, she said.
In a paper on published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 1995, Poehlman said he had tested 35 healthy women and retested the same women six years later in the "The Longitudinal Menopause Study: 1994-2000" when he actually falsified and fabricated test results for 32 of the women.
In applications for federal grants, Poehlman lied about the number of subjects he had tested in "The Longitudinal Study of Aging: 1996-2000" and changed the data about their physical characteristics and test results to create trends that did not occur in the research.
Poehlman also made up the results from a 1999-2000 Hormone Replacement Therapy study to seek federal funding.
UVM started to investigate Poehlman in December of 2000 when Walter F. DeNino, one of his research assistants, accused him of scientific misconduct.
During the two year investigation, Poehlman deleted electronic evidence of his falsifications, presented false testimony and documents and influenced other witnesses to provide false documents, the U.S. attorney's office said.
The findings were referred to the U.S. attorney's office and the Office of Research Integrity within the Public Health Service, which investigated all of his grant applications and scientific publications.
Poehlman will be arraigned, possibly next week.
Poehlman resigned from UVM in 2001 and moved to Montreal, Canada, to work as a researcher. He has since left his job in Canada.
His lawyer, Robert B. Hemley, said Thursday that he could not comment on where Poehlman was. He also said he was unwilling to comment on the case until at least after the sentencing.
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