It’s possible that a university’s image has never been more important than it is today, and that’s because the higher education environment has never been this fraught.

Starting this fall, universities are expected to spend the next two decades competing for a shrinking pool of college-aged students, bringing the concerns of the “enrollment cliff” to bear.  With families struggling financially, there’s growing skepticism about the value of a degree. Geopolitical volatility has complicated global recruitment strategies for students and faculty. Federal policy changes have created many uncertainties for the future of research and healthcare.

The is meeting the moment with a refreshed brand strategy and identity. Launched in October 2025, the refreshed brand reflects Ģ����ý’s evolution while creating a new foundation to strengthen its global reputation—one of the five pillars of , the University’s strategic plan.

Sid Bhattacharya, the associate vice president for marketing, and Michelle Hildreth, the director of creative strategy and solutions, are two of the people from Ģ����ý marketing and communications (UMC) who were integral to Ģ����ý’s first brand refresh in almost 20 years. In a Leadership Conversation, Bhattacharya and Hildreth offered a behind-the-scenes look at their ongoing work on the brand, including multichannel national campaigns that aim to enhance Ģ����ý’s reputation worldwide.

Here are five takeaways.

Marketing isn’t an act; it’s a system.

Until 2023, Ģ����ý was primarily engaged in what Bhattacharya called “random acts of marketing.” That started to change when was hired as the University’s first vice president for marketing and communications. Redefining the legacy position to include marketing paved the way for a marketing division, which began to take shape in September 2024 when Bhattacharya joined the University.

The primary goal of the marketing team was to re-envision Ģ����ý’s brand and develop ongoing initiatives to convey the University’s strengths for contemporary audiences. Bhattacharya’s earliest conversations put the ultimate goal of his team’s work in clear terms.

“There was consistent drumbeating around being sick and tired of Ģ����ý being a hidden gem. How do we lose ‘hidden’ and become just a gem?”

A big part of Bhattacharya’s role was to unleash Ģ����ý locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. To give the University the spotlight it deserves, the marketing team is executing a strategy that is taking place across five platforms:

• Brand
• Enrollment (undergraduate and graduate)
• Storytelling (e.g., Social Media, News Center, Rochester Review)
• Digital (including web modernization)
• Strategic internal communications

Bhattacharya has overseen a deliberate shift toward a more comprehensive, layered approach that employs strategic tactics and initiatives, working with partners across the institution.

One of the latest examples of this work is the flagship brand video The 90-second spot presents Ģ����ý as a place that thinks in terms of “and,” not “or,” celebrating the way its community blends ideas, supplements interests, and connects disciplines. Hildreth noted that the video features more than 40 students, faculty, and staff and an original score composed by the Emmy Award-winner , an associate professor of contemporary media and film composition, which was performed by the .

Higher ed audiences want less polish and more proof.

More and more students and families are looking at the cost of tuition and the prospective debt that comes with a degree, and they’re wondering, “Is this worth it?” Hildreth shared that not only are they more skeptical than previous generations, they’re also better at tuning out traditional marketing—and almost instinctively rejecting it.

So, how does Ģ����ý ensure it’s heard? Hildreth pointed to five strategies.

The first is audience-specific storytelling. A prospective student wants different information than an alumnus considering a gift or a research partner exploring collaboration opportunities. Ģ����ý’s challenge is to tailor stories that resonate with each group without straying from its overarching brand message.

Outcomes-first messaging is another approach that emphasizes how Ģ����ý degrees and research lead to careers and real-world solutions.

Authenticity and “peer voice” have also become increasingly important. Hildreth noted they are leaning into student-generated content, highlighting real experiences because it helps build trust and works a lot better than “sizzle marketing.”

Equally important to using an authentic voice is being transparent and accountable, especially with current or prospective donors or external partners and the broader public. These groups want clear evidence of institutional impact, including how Ģ����ý is using philanthropic funds and the outcomes of research.

Finally, there’s the rise of a brand system—enemy to random acts of marketing. The marketing team is moving away from one-off campaigns and brand moments to ensure Ģ����ý expresses itself consistently across all touchpoints.

“The universities that ‘win’ in the next decade of brand perception aren’t going to be the ones that spend the most on marketing. They’ll be the ones that have the clearest sense of who they are and have the courage to express it.”

AI is reshaping how people discover URochester.

Student search behavior is changing in a big way. Instead of pulling up Google and typing specific topics like “no core curriculum” into the search bar, they are increasingly using AI-driven platforms, such as ChatGPT and Claude, to ask complex, multi-variable questions.

Bhattacharya addressed this shift, explaining that while traditional paid search or search engine optimization remains important, they also need to consider answer or generative engine optimization. These days, even if a student uses Google to search, the first thing they will see is an AI overview, which may provide whatever information they are looking for. The rise of “zero-click searching” has many universities working to enhance their discoverability. Bhattacharya shared that his team conducted some testing and didn’t love the way Ģ����ý currently appears in these instances.

“In order for us to show up better when prompt queries we care about are used, we have to do some content, website organization, and structural work. So, we’ll be thinking about how we can show up in the right way, at the right times.”

Social media is another area where the marketing team is leveraging AI, specifically through , a comprehensive social media management and intelligence platform. The platform’s AI-assisted content publishing and generation feature enables the team to quickly and easily develop a range of content options that they can shape to fit the moment. Other examples include generating alt text for images and “inbox automation,” which simplifies how Ģ����ý accounts engage with followers by categorizing messages and suggesting responses. By automating some of the more routine work in this space, the social team is freed to spend more time on creative strategy and storytelling.

Hildreth acknowledged AI is a hot-button issue for creatives, some of whom won’t consider using it at all. However, her team embraces it for research and the synthesis phase of the creative process (e.g., mood-boarding). And there’s one critically important rule: nothing goes out without a human touching it.

House of brands < Branded house

April 15 was a big day at URochester, and the reason may have flown under the radar for many (especially if they missed the April 20 issue of @Rochester). The University’s health system formally changed from “UR Medicine” to “Ģ����ý Medicine.” It may seem like a minor change, but it’s a major move for brand and visual alignment that reinforces the One University philosophy in a meaningful way.

Historically, Ģ����ý schools and units operated with significant independence in how they presented themselves, creating an institution of many brands. The marketing team’s work has helped to bring those brands (i.e., UR Medicine) under a single umbrella where they can share a visual and messaging framework that allows for some flexibility.

Hildreth explained that the value of the brand system is the way it relieves University entities from having to spend time explaining who they are, what they stand for, or how they are part of Ģ����ý—it’s all baked in.

The marketing team has empowered schools and units to be good brand and University citizens by offering guidelines and an array of resources at . There’s also the brand activation tool, , which offers hundreds of ready-to-use, customizable templates.

“Folks are realizing how much better this landscape is for creation. We’re giving them little nuggets, and they’re really running with them. It is good to see people adopting it and making it their own.”

Bhattacharya added that brand unity not only creates a stronger, more recognizable identity but also offers practical benefits, such as cutting costs and minimizing duplicative efforts. There’s also some data that shows the brand work is working.

In February 2024, the marketing team used a comprehensive Harris poll to gauge how well people know who Ģ����ý is, what it does, and what’s distinctive about it. In the last year and a half, brand awareness has gone from 11 percent to 24 percent.

Undergraduate applications were up almost nine percent, and early decision applications are up 17 percent. Both are important signals as admission is the University’s revenue engine. In all cases, Bhattacharya emphasized these gains aren’t just the product of recruitment marketing; they’re part of a cumulative effort and everyone aligning with the University brand.

The work is far from done.

Ģ����ý is part of a crowded and increasingly competitive market. Although the marketing teams have reinvigorated the brand and produced some early results, the efforts to date should be considered an initial set of moves in a long game.

Hildreth shared that as the marketing team continues to strengthen the brand, they will look to elevate their video content and digital work. Bhattacharya is looking forward to expanding Ģ����ý’s market presence beyond the 11 core markets of its current image campaign.

Given the long tail of brand work, Bhattacharya and Hildreth were asked to consider what makes a brand last. What gives a brand power?

Hildreth believes a strong brand is clear and confident.

“There are a lot of universities and companies out there that are afraid to have a point of view. But the brands that stand out stand for something clear, and they do it in a way that helps the audience see themselves in it.”

Bhattacharya emphasized authenticity. As his team developed Ģ����ý’s brand strategy, they focused on what is genuinely unique about the University, grounding it in strong proof points. He also expressed gratitude for the University’s initial investment in the brand because consistency is critical to the momentum and visibility that builds recognition. Finally, he pointed to credibility and trust, as once those are lost, branding no longer matters.

Developing a brand that is clear, confident, authentic, consistent, and trustworthy isn’t achieved by policing the University community; rather it’s cultivated by a community of evangelists.

“A brand is never done,” said Bhattacharya. “And maintaining it is not solely the role and responsibility of the marketing team; it’s on all of us.”

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on May 9, 2023. It was updated in July 2024 to include video of Josh Shapiro’s commencement speech and updated again on May 24, 2026, with an excerpt reprinted with permission from (Harper, 2026).

Josh Shapiro ’95 was elected governor of Pennsylvania in November 2022—the first alumnus to hold a state’s top executive position.

Shapiro delivered the address at the University-wide 2023 Commencement Ceremony held in Fauver Stadium at the Brian F. Prince Athletic Complex on the River Campus.

The governor of the fifth most populated state in the United States took time to answer questions via email about his time at Rochester, his unplanned veer into politics, and his advice for graduating students.

The scientific establishment wasn’t ready.

It was the early 2010s, and knew she was on the cusp of answering one of the most fundamental questions in biology: Why do we sleep?

The neuroscientist and codirector of ’s had discovered what she and her husband and codirector would dub the , a biological “dishwasher” that scrubs the brain of waste during sleep. It was a finding so important that Science magazine would list it among its 10 breakthroughs of the year in 2013.

You wouldn’t have guessed its importance if you’d attended her prepublication talks at sleep conferences and meetings. She enthused to her colleagues about the idea of brain clearance, but they regarded her with open skepticism. “They were like, ‘What is she talking about?’” Nedergaard recalls. “People looked at me like I was crazy.”

Yet the science was clear. Using sophisticated microscopy techniques to peer inside the brain, her work revealed a cellular cleaning cycle that flushes out toxic proteins primarily during sleep.

A decade and a half after those inauspicious meetings, Nedergaard’s discovery has become an engine for research worldwide, generating nearly 2,000 scientific papers. Ģ����ý half of them, she notes with pride, are clinical papers that address the glymphatic system’s role in diseases and conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to strokes and migraines.

On this early March afternoon, Nedergaard, who last year became Ģ����ý’s 11th fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, is busy preparing for the . The event, built on her foundational research, has attracted 250 registrants and a 50-person waiting list. Nedergaard is the keynote speaker.

Nedergaard’s discovery is perhaps the most dramatic chapter in a story about sleep that has been building for a generation at Ģ����ý. But it is far from the only one. In labs, clinics, classrooms, and beyond, the University has built a formidable concentration of expertise in sleep.

And it is a story that is growing ever more relevant at a moment when people have moved from bragging about how little sleep they need to giving sleep its proper due as one of the essential pillars of health.

The whys of zzzzs

Scientists had long wondered how the brain, which gobbles up about 20 percent of our body’s energy, maintained itself. In the rest of the body, the lymphatic system works alongside the bloodstream to clear away waste. But the blood-brain barrier blocks that system entirely, leaving the brain without an obvious mechanism for cleaning itself.

One long-held theory was that the brain had its own version of a lymphatic system that used cerebrospinal fluid. But the methods scientists had typically used to understand the process—studying brain sections of dead animals—had left plenty of unanswered questions.

Knowing my love for the Ģ����ý, a family member recently surprised me with a unique gift for the holidays—a small leather rectangle stamped with the pre-1928 Rochester seal. They found it on eBay a while back but didn’t have much information regarding its history. Do you know its origins and what it might have been used for?
—Jason Buitrago ’07, ’14W (MS)

Your gift was originally tucked inside a pack of cigarettes, issued circa 1910. Though made of leather, it belongs to a long history of cigarette, or trading, “cards.”

As Maurice Rickards writes in his Encyclopedia of Ephemera, “Cigarette cards were among the first items of ephemera to be produced specifically for collecting. Originating in America as cardboard stiffeners for the paper packs in which cigarettes were then sold, it was shortly realized that the . . . blank cards might serve some promotional purpose.”

What better way to convince consumers to keep buying than to distribute cards in limited-run series on topics of interest to people of all ages? Beginning in the late 1870s, cigarette companies issued cards with themes ranging from historical figures and literary characters to flags, flowers, and, of course, athletes.

American colleges and universities entered the mix around 1910. Appearing alongside Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many others, Ģ����ý made it into nearly every set. By then, protecting package contents had become largely secondary to marketing, and companies began producing sets in other materials such as leather, silk, and felt.

Leather rectangles and triangular pennants appeared in various colors, either “blind-stamped” like yours or with color accents. “Silks” came in two formats: small woven strips in solid colors featuring school names and seals, and more fragile printed four-by-five-inch silk panels tucked into cigar boxes. One such design included a basketball and net, the first verse of “The Genesee,” the school yell, and the pre-1928 seal. Paper cards came in two sizes and depicted an energetic scene of students playing ice hockey—organized as a varsity sport in the fall of 1906.

There is no evidence of any objection to being included in these promotions, but the Archives holds no documents suggesting University administrators were consulted, either. And tobacco wasn’t the only vehicle: Weber Bakery in Irvington, New Jersey, also distributed cards, perhaps licensing the image from a tobacco company. Text on the back promised a different card packed with each loaf of bread every day for two months, and posed the question: “Which college is your favorite?”

Fair warning, though: Acquiring Ģ����ý ephemera can be habit-forming. The Archives’ holdings grew significantly recently, thanks to a gift from Mark Zaid ’89 from his extensive collection. Look for the first installment—his postcards and tobacco ephemera—on the  soon.

This story appears in the spring 2026 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.

Timothy Peterson spends much of his time in places most people never see: under freeway overpasses, inside warehouse studios, in half-finished spaces where artists are still working out ideas and responding in real time to the zeitgeist. He is looking for what isn’t settled yet, for concepts still taking shape.

For the Ģ����ý’s (MAG), those instincts carry remarkable weight. As the inaugural , Peterson isn’t just selecting artworks to acquire; he’s helping shape how the future will understand the present—building a collection that reflects today’s bracing complexity while engaging with MAG’s 5,000 years of holdings.

Upstairs, one finds Egyptian mummies, a Baroque organ, and Monet’s soft washes of color. Descend into the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, though, and the aesthetic shift hits immediately. “I give a great deal of attention to sightlines,” Peterson says. Dominating one wall is Erin Shirreff’s Paper Sculpture, a large-scale shadow box composed of magnified scans from vintage photography. From afar, its dots and rosettes coalesce into what appears to be plaster, stone, wood, and metal; up close, the illusion dissolves into curving planes and fragments of printed matter.

“I love that after the long walk to Paper Sculpture, its shadow box format still provides further depth to consider up close,” Peterson says. That layering lets the viewer observe both “three-dimensional forms in a culture mediated by still and moving images” and aspects of collage, sculpture, and dye-sublimation printing—all processes that figure in modern and contemporary art.

Peterson’s other important sightline, leading from an entrance used by local school groups to Wayne Thiebaud’s River Pond, shows how an artist famous for cakes and pies renders landscape with similar pastels and precision. Both works speak to Peterson’s curatorial vision: conversation sparked and sustained through encounters with artists, materials, and ideas still cohering.

It is a vision that extends far beyond Rochester, notes , the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of MAG.

Curating the canon

“Contemporary art is different from all the other categories of art in an encyclopedic museum because every artwork—baroque, impressionist, modernist—was once contemporary,” Jesse says. “When a museum as important as MAG selects what enters its contemporary collection, it is helping determine what artists and artworks enter what we call ‘the canon.’ Think of how important that is.”

Those high stakes animated the search that brought Peterson to Rochester in September 2024 as the museum’s first contemporary art curator, a position endowed by local gallerist Deborah Ronnen in honor of her parents. “Timothy’s position isn’t just important to MAG, or to the arts in Rochester,” Jesse says. “It will have an impact on the art world.”

Peterson—who grew up in Minnesota and earned a bachelor’s in art history at St. Olaf College followed by a master’s in art history at Williams College—has curated more than 150 exhibitions and worked with artists ranging from emerging voices to internationally recognized figures. Over nearly four decades, he has held leadership roles at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis.

Yet what distinguishes Peterson is not only experience—it is orientation. Over an orange-flavored Celsius in the museum’s pavilion, he speaks in a rhythm that mirrors his approach: connective, passionate, attentive. Even when discussing acquisitions or installations, he returns to the artists and their processes. “You’re not just studying objects,” he says. “You’re trying to understand how something comes into being, and why it matters.”

That inquiry often begins in the studio—many of which are in locations Peterson likens to “no man’s land”—or at gallery openings, where he tracks emerging directions in contemporary practice. It requires a particular kind of judgment: the ability to recognize significance before it is widely acknowledged. On a trip to New York City, for example, he was eager to view the work of Carmen de Monteflores, the mother of artist Andrea Fraser, who has exhibited works in the Whitney Biennial. Though de Monteflores never received widespread recognition, she exemplifies the often-hidden talent Peterson seeks out.

“He’s able to separate the signal from the noise,” Jesse says, “which is arguably one of the most important skills a curator of contemporary art can have.”

Dialogue on display

The sensibility Jesse describes is immediately visible in Peterson’s reimagining of MAG’s contemporary gallery. One of his first acts upon arriving was to remove 13 interior walls, opening the space to natural light and continuous sightlines. Sculpture, photography, and painting now coexist in an environment that encourages visual and conceptual connections.

“We’re leaning into openness,” Peterson says. “The goal is to create an environment where works can speak to each other, and to visitors, without being confined by strict categories.”

Within that environment, materials become a starting point for conversation. Hugo McCloud’s Blue Zone, constructed from hand-cut and ironed single-use plastic bags, transforms a ubiquitous byproduct of global commerce into a monumental depiction of physical labor on a street in India. The work underscores both environmental degradation and the invisibility of manual work while posing a practical question for the museum: How will such materials endure?

“No material is off-limits now,” Peterson says. “The question is how it survives.” That tension between experimentation and preservation reflects a broader shift in contemporary art, where artists increasingly work with unconventional materials that challenge traditional museum practices.

In Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Darkroom Mirror, two partially unclothed men share a camera, their faces obscured. “In many ways, photography offers visitors the most immediate opportunity to see themselves reflected in an artwork,” Peterson says. “In this case, the artist and his friend offer queer visibility, and animate Sepuya’s notion of the artist’s studio as a social and cultural space for interaction and artmaking.” MAG’s collection of more than 12,000 objects includes over 250 works in photography, the majority dating from 1950 and later.

Expanding the frame

“My goal is to expand the conversation,” Peterson says. “To create new ways of thinking, new points of entry.” That means, in part, acquiring more works by women, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ artists—ensuring, as he puts it, that “a wider world” exists within the gallery’s walls.

In Caroline Kent’s Timely movements match hidden motivations, abstract shapes and patterns glide across layered black backgrounds. Using cut-paper techniques, Kent treats abstraction as a form of visual language that resists fixed meaning while inviting viewers into the interpretive process. To extend Kent’s sensibility beyond the canvas, Peterson will work with her to create a large-scale wall drawing in MAG’s pavilion that he hopes will generate an immersive, chromatic energy.

Hanging across from Kent’s piece and next to McCloud’s Blue Zone, Euphemism (Knot Stories) gives sculptural form to tension and resilience. The black-glazed ceramic box by Paul S. Briggs is densely threaded with coiled, knotted tubes that push against and pierce its structure. Drawing on Black poetry and the realities of mass incarceration, the work transforms traditional ceramic techniques into a meditation on constraint and endurance—historical form pressed into urgent contemporary service.

A pink marble statue on a cedar plinth, Sanford Biggers’s The Cantor similarly layers histories and visual traditions. By combining a female ancestor mask from the African Chokwe people with a classical Greek maiden, Biggers connects three of MAG’s collection areas—classical sculpture, African art, and contemporary art—while prompting new conversations about identity, materiality, and cultural inheritance.

Louis Fratino’s The young father, meanwhile, offers “an exceptionally rare image of fatherhood in the museum’s collection, as well as a rare male nude sculpture—which were key points in acquiring it,” Peterson says. The bronze figure expands the emotional and representational range of the collection, foregrounding intimacy, vulnerability, and care in ways that feel both timeless and newly visible.

Collecting contemporary art means making decisions before consensus has formed and before an artist’s place in history is secure. “You’re making a judgment about what will last,” Peterson says. “And history shows us how unpredictable that can be—Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime.”

An anchor for regional culture

Peterson’s endowed position places him within a longer institutional history shaped by visionary women.

“Uniquely among American museums, strong women have been instrumental at every point in MAG’s history,” Jesse says. “Emily Sibley Watson founded the institution; Hannah Durand Gould created the first acquisition fund; the Herdle sisters built MAG into a nationally important encyclopedic museum. And now Deborah Ronnen has given us our largest gift and established an endowment that will make us a significant player in contemporary art.”

That foundation frees Peterson to do the work he considers essential: learning about the community, supporting other creative people, and nurturing vital relationships. Since his arrival, he has connected with institutions such as the George Eastman Museum and Visual Studies Workshop, a nonprofit organization dedicated to arts education. And he is conducting studio visits throughout the region, from Buffalo to the Finger Lakes, to build coalitions of regional artists.

Because the endowment exists in perpetuity, so does the mandate. “Our challenge is to show up not only for artists who have already proven themselves,” Peterson says, “but for those whose work will resonate when we look back.”

Stress is the body’s natural reaction to a challenge. While our psychological, behavioral, and biological responses to stress can be beneficial, chronic stress can have serious negative health implications. At the new Resilience Research Center, faculty from across the Ģ����ý investigate why some people bounce back from stress, trauma, and adversity and others don’t—and what can be done about it.

, Dean’s Professor, , and Professor, Departments of and :

“My research focuses on early-life exposures to neighborhood and community sources of stress and how those exposures affect health throughout the life course.

In looking at how the pandemic exacerbated the overdose crisis, we found that pre-pandemic community vulnerability and local economic conditions, as measured by high unemployment, explained most of the large increases in overdose mortality through 2022. We also found that access to substance-use treatment during pregnancy improved outcomes for mothers and infants, including reducing preterm birth and severe maternal morbidity. In terms of environmental exposures during pregnancy, our team has found adverse infant and maternal outcomes with exposures to traffic, shale gas development, low-quality public drinking water, hazardous waste management, construction projects, and extreme heat.

has led me to say environmental policy and economic policy are health policy. Policies that target improving community contexts and building community resilience are likely to have meaningful returns on investment, leading to improved health and well-being over the long term.”

, Professor, , and Executive Director, :

“There are remarkable stories of resilience, of people who have come from amazingly difficult systems, families, experiences. For three decades I have studied how early adversity and trauma impact human development at various levels of functioning. The bulk of has focused on child sexual abuse, and my work has contributed to foundational knowledge that explains the vast mental and physical health disparities exhibited by survivors.

These disparities include difficulties in social relationships with peers, parents, romantic partners, and even with one’s own children. Marked mental health difficulties, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and an overactive stress-response system can disrupt key stress-regulated physiological systems associated with health and longevity. These disruptions affect our ability to fight off disease and can set the stage for metabolic and behavioral problems.

I pay particular attention to variables, conditions, and contexts that help explain why some survivors emerge relatively unscathed in comparison to their peers, as these are clues to early intervention and prevention.”

, Professor, and Departments of and , and Associate Chief of Research,  :

“Stress is experienced across the lifespan. What changes are the challenges or stressors we face. Children absolutely feel stress, whether from school pressures, family circumstances, or social dynamics. Adolescents often experience stress around identity and belonging, while adults may juggle work and caregiving or financial strain. For older adults, stress combined with aging can increase the risk for poor health in later life.

My current focus is on finding ways to promote well-being and immune health in caregivers of a family member with dementia, as well as individuals at risk for dementia. We found that improving attention and the speed at which stressed caregivers processed information—using computerized cognitive training—also improved their memory performance under laboratory stress. Importantly, cognitive training also lessened their negative emotional responses to memory problems and challenging behaviors of their family member with dementia, suggesting that these brain games can build caregivers’ cognitive and emotional resilience.”

Michelle Carr ’10, ’22 (Flw) had experienced her share of vivid—often terrifying—dreams throughout childhood and into early adulthood. What happened at the end of a mid-morning nap during her sophomore year at the Ģ����ý was different. No one was chasing her. Nothing was wrong. She was just there.

“I was in my dorm room in Rochester, and I sat up in bed,” Carr recalls over Zoom from her office at the . “I realized I was dreaming, and I looked down and could see my sleeping body lying in bed. I stood up and walked over to the wall and to the desk. I was just looking at the dream because I was so shocked at how my mind was doing this. I thought, ‘It looks so real.’ It was like that scene in Inception where [Saito] looks at the carpet very closely. That was the whole dream. I just looked at the wall and the desk, and I was like, ‘This is possible.’”

What Carr was experiencing had a name—lucid dreaming, the state in which a person becomes aware, mid-dream, that they are dreaming—though she didn’t know it yet. Or that deciphering experiences like the one she’d just had would become her life’s work.

Today, Carr is one of a small global cohort of researchers who call themselves dream engineers—scientists who apply techniques and technologies to influence, record, and manipulate the content of dreams to benefit memory, creativity, or well-being. She helped coin the term, organized the first Dream Engineering Workshop, and late last year released the first book to bring dream engineering to a mainstream audience. The field was galvanized by that first lucid dream but its roots, in fact, run much deeper.

Eyes wide shut

Carr grew up in Corning, New York, a small city about 100 miles south of Rochester, with two brothers and parents who highly valued education—her mother taught special education in the local school district and her father rose to vice president at Corning Community College. At around age three, she was diagnosed with moderate hearing loss—a difficulty hearing higher frequencies, and consonants in particular, that requires her to wear hearing aids in order to understand speech—and the family began making regular trips to Rochester, a hub for audiology care and home to .

“I was just looking at the dream because I was so shocked at how my mind was doing this. I thought, ‘It looks so real.’�ĝ

Equipped with what she describes as a “very, very vivid” imagination, Carr was drawn to both science and the arts. She was captivated by biology and harbored ambitions of becoming a writer. Dreams were a defining presence in her childhood, too—some pleasant, others so troubling that she would lie awake for hours to avoid sleep. Her first science project, predictably enough, tackled the subject head-on.

“It was the first time the teacher was like, ‘You have to find your sources in the library and give a poster presentation to the class.’ So I guess I was always interested in dreams because that was the topic that I chose,” Carr recalls, laughing. “I just remember every single person in the class asked me a question afterward. Mostly, it was the typical, ‘I have this dream; what does it mean?’ Which is still what everybody does when they find out what I do.”

Carr was 15 when she experienced the first of what would become frequent episodes of sleep paralysis—when the natural muscle paralysis that occurs during REM sleep seeps into a dream. “A shotgun fires my mind into a sudden awakening, but my body does not jolt from the recoil,” she described one such episode for an undergraduate writing assignment. “What was that? It’s pitch black but for a thin line of foggy light coming through the forced squint of my eyelids. I can’t move. Why can’t I move?! I must be tied down. I must be paralyzed, or dead. My eyes . . . won’t open!”

More frightening than nightmares, Carr’s sleep paralysis often involved a demon-like creature pressing so hard on her chest that it felt like it was squeezing the life right out of her. When she shared her experiences with a few friends, no one seemed to understand or recognize what was happening. (Even her professor would later tell her it sounded “too fictional” for a nonfiction writing assignment.) It was only when she went to [the early search engine] Ask Jeeves that she learned the term “sleep paralysis”—and that she was far from alone in suffering it. “The bad news was that a select few unlucky people go on to experience sleep paralysis regularly throughout their lives, and there was no known cure or treatment,” she wrote. “I was to become one of those people.”

Alternate realities

When Carr arrived at Ģ����ý as a first-year student in the fall of 2006, she planned to major in biology. But an Intro to Cognition class prompted her to switch immediately to brain and cognitive sciences. “There’s the where they show you what the attentional blink is. You’re watching people play with a ball and then a gorilla walks through the scene—you don’t even notice it because you’re paying attention to the ball,” she says. “I was just fascinated to learn that everyone’s mind is doing this. Everything seems so concrete and so stable and solid, but it’s really illusory—we’re fabricating what we perceive in some way. And I think that ties into dreaming quite a bit.”

Carr got her first taste of research as a sophomore intern in the under psychiatry professor . She recalls participating in one overnight study—“just for fun”—but mostly cleaning data, reviewing scientific literature, and performing other entry-level tasks as needed. “She was one of these very motivated students who, I think, knew from early on that she was going to graduate school,” says Pigeon. “She was the kind of person who would always ask, ‘Is there anything else I can do?’”

Carr worked in three other labs as an undergraduate, studying everything from visual cognition to video games and infant-mother attachment, while satisfying her love of the arts through clusters in photography, creative writing, tai chi, and drum circles. “I think a huge strength of going to school there was just the amount of opportunities available,” she says. “I also really liked that side of U of R, how much the arts and creativity and the humanities were valued in concert with science and psychology. That, to me, is dream science—it’s something that’s ephemeral and hard to describe, but we’re also trying to study it very scientifically through the brain and understand what’s happening. I really appreciate being able to straddle those two worlds.”

“Flying is the first trick everyone learns, and once you do, that’s your transport mode of choice—forever.”

Over the years, Carr also became something of an expert in lucid dreaming. After that first experience, she read everything on the topic she could find. She learned about ancient religions that used the practice to harness altered states of consciousness or prepare for death. She even conducted her own experiments, learning how to move around inside her dreams (“Flying is the first trick everyone learns, and once you do, that’s your transport mode of choice—forever”) or practice skills, like tai chi, that she was studying in her waking life. Perhaps most significantly, she discovered she could use lucid dreaming to confront, and even transform, her most distressing nightmares and fears.

But finding a graduate program where she could study dreams—not just sleep, not just neuroscience, but dreams—turned out to be harder than she expected. Unwilling to compromise, she cold emailed a dozen researchers she found through the (IASD). “Is there anywhere I can actually study dreams?” Several people told her no, but four or five pointed her to the same place: the , run by a researcher named . She applied—very late, as it turned out—and was accepted into the graduate program.

“It’s funny. I found the email I wrote to [Nielsen] before I even started, with a long list of the topics I was interested in at the time. I could have written it today,” Carr says. “I’m interested in how dreaming is related to mental health and well-being—how we can interact with our dreams, gain insight from them, and try to make them more positive. But also the more functional mechanisms of sleep: How is dreaming related to memory consolidation during sleep? How is it related to what’s happening in the body?”

Into the lab

Carr spent five years in Montreal, impressing Nielsen with her calm demeanor and inquisitive mind. “Unlike me, she was quite confident in lucid dreaming being accepted by other, non-dream-oriented researchers as a legitimate area of science,” he says. “Coming from a background heavily steeped in behaviorism, I never had this kind of confidence. At the same time, I came to appreciate that Michelle had very good ideas about the possible functions of dreams and nightmares.”

Some of those ideas were published in a joint paper with Nielsen on sensory processing sensitivity and nightmare sufferers. Others reached a different audience entirely through a Carr maintained for several years, translating dream science research for general readers—an early sign that her interests extended beyond the lab.

The next stop after Montreal was Swansea, Wales, where Carr spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher in the sleep lab of British research psychologist . It was there that she began running her first polysomnography (sleep study) experiments using light and sound cues to induce lucid dreams. “Getting people to give eye signals in response to our cues while they were sleeping was really exciting,” she says. “That was fun.” Blagrove also introduced her to dreamwork—the practice of sharing dreams for both personal insight and empathy—which Carr continues to study for its potential to enhance social connection.

It was while at Swansea that Carr’s ambitions for dream engineering as a field—not just a set of techniques scattered across different labs—crystallized into something concrete. In January 2019, she organized and led the first at the MIT Media Lab, bringing together more than 50 scientists to brainstorm new technologies for studying, recording, and influencing dreams.

Later that fall, Carr returned to Ģ����ý—and to Pigeon’s lab—this time as a postdoctoral associate supported by the . The fellowship enabled her to study sleep in Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, drawing on her own experience with hearing loss and that of Rochester’s large Deaf community. Around the same time, Carr was rising through the ranks of the IASD—first as vice president, then as president beginning in 2021.

“She is, at first blush, not someone you would think of as especially outgoing—and yet she has a very vast and nice network of folks that she’s built over time,” Pigeon says. “Some people who may have been working relatively independently in their labs are now a community, talking about [dream engineering] and developing it as a subfield. And it was wild that before she was even a faculty member, she became president of an international organization. It’s unheard of.”

Living the dream

Carr now directs the Dream Engineering Lab——at the University of Montreal’s , where she oversees six to eight graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working across several concurrent studies. The projects reflect Carr’s wide-ranging interests, from lucid dreaming and the memory sources of dreams to a unique partnership with a film studies team exploring targeted dream incubation—a technique in which subjects are shown a movie just prior to sleep, then hear clips of its soundtrack at different sleep stages.

But what excites her most—and what she expounds on in her new book, —is collaborating with clinicians to help those suffering from serious conditions such as addiction and chronic pain. “I see a lot of other clinical researchers becoming interested in dreams and nightmares and how prevalent they are in their patients, and starting to question whether there’s an avenue for treatment there that’s so far been neglected,” she says. “I feel like an energy is starting to spread to other domains. Other research fields are saying, ‘OK, there’s something we could do with this.’�ĝ

Looking ahead, Carr sees sleep—and the dreams that animate it—becoming as vital to understanding our physical and mental health as anything that happens during our waking lives. “I think we’re really beginning to uncover this,” she says. “There are specific patterns in how dreaming changes in different health conditions. It’s something we can use as information, but also something we can treat. That would change the quality of our sleep, but also the quality of our lives.”

Nearly two decades since she first awoke inside a dream, Carr has reached a point where she can choose whether to enter “that dark basement corner of our unconscious mind” or simply bask in the sensation of becoming lucid. Most nights she sleeps nine hours and wakes without an alarm. “I usually spend some time remembering my dreams, but I don’t often write them down unless they’re really striking. I just kind of rehearse them a little bit,” she says. “If I had a bad dream, I’ll think about it and maybe reframe it. But that’s really it.”

Then she gets up and looks around. She might glance back at the bed. There’s nothing—and no one—there.

Political science professor examines how American multinational corporations have shaped—and been shaped by—global governance structures, tracing how firms influence regulatory frameworks, economic policy, and transnational cooperation. He argues that corporations are not merely market actors but central participants in constructing and sustaining international order. (Cambridge University Press)

Eastman historian and musicologist offers a lively cultural history of postwar performers who redefined artistic and personal freedom. Through vivid portraits of musicians, dancers, and experimental artists, he charts how their embrace of self-realization transformed the arts, psychology, education, and wellness—establishing authenticity as an enduring American ideal. (University of California Press)

Assistant Professor of Russian documents the unlikely ascent of Soviet rock cinema, a genre born from Cold War tensions and underground music scenes. Safariants shows how the films reflected perestroika-era upheaval and continue to influence Russian cultural identity, even as shifting political forces reshape their meaning and legacy. (University of Wisconsin Press)

Professor of Conducting and Ensembles leads the Munich Philharmonic in a sweeping performance of Philip Glass’s ���ٲ�����ú, a monumental choral-orchestral work inspired by a vast hydroelectric dam. Lubman’s interpretation highlights both the meditative pull and dramatic scale of Glass’s vision, capturing the work’s immersive sonic landscape. (Münchner Philharmoniker)

The , under , delivers a vibrant program celebrating the genre-crossing compositions of Jeff Tyzik ’73E, ’77E (MM). Blending classical precision with jazz vitality, the album showcases the ensemble’s virtuosity and stylistic range. Performances by high-profile alumni artists enhance the technical brilliance and joyful energy that define Tyzik’s music—and his abiding connection to Eastman.
(Summit Records)

Professor of Opera ’92E (MM) conducts this stirring contemporary opera confronting the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. With music by Brian Current and a libretto by Marie Clements, the recording follows a young woman transformed by a spiritual encounter. Fusing contemporary classical music with Indigenous language and traditions, this work functions as both elegy and call to action, demanding these lives not be forgotten. (Bright Shiny Things)

This story appears in the spring 2026 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the Ģ����ý.