Alexander Neumeister

Yale News
Ex-Professor Sentenced to Play Piano
By Carly Wanna
October 16, 2018

— Excerpt

Alexander Neumeister, a former associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, was sentenced to play the piano last Wednesday after pleading guilty in June to stealing government funds.

Neumeister was a psychiatry professor at the New York University School of Medicine from 2011 to 2015. According to his guilty plea, Neumeister stole $87,000 from NYU as well as from other grant programs from 2012 to 2014. During his time as a researcher at Yale from 2004 to 2010, Neumeister was also required to repay $76,000 he stole from the University. Still, the charges launched against Neumeister stemmed solely from his conduct at NYU, according to a 2017 press release from the Department of Justice of the Southern District of New York.

Neumeister’s crimes landed him an atypical sentence. According to the AP story, he now must play the piano for an hour at least twice a week for three years to elderly people in facilities across Bridgeport, Waterbury, New Haven and Hartford. The same story noted that U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres said that pre-sentencing material alerted her to Neumeister’s background as a trained pianist…

While at NYU, Neumeister misused thousands of dollars, spending the funds on personal activities. Specifically, the press release said he allegedly used an estimated $9,000 to repeatedly visit one particular friend in Salt Lake City and used school funds to finance a nine-day vacation on a resort in Miami Beach for the friend. Neumeister originally falsely identified the friend as a research study participant to justify the expense…

According to Krystal, Neumeister left the University for a position at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and began his work at NYU soon after.