Last year, two professors in the department, Dr. Richard Aslin and Dr. Jessica Cantlon, filed a sexual harassment complaint against Dr. Jaeger with the university, which was investigated by Catherine Nearpass, the university’s associate counsel for employment and labor relations issues. Administrators found that Dr. Jaeger had not violated university policy on discrimination and harassment. The professors appealed, and the university upheld the decision. After that, the professors said, they faced sustained retaliation from university leadership.

In May 2016, while the investigation was still ongoing, Dr. Jaeger was promoted to full professor.

The new federal complaint, to which Dr. Aslin and Dr. Cantlon are also parties, gathered the testimony of 11 women, including a current professor in the department and former undergraduates who had worked with Dr. Jaeger. The accounts range from being approached sexually by Dr. Jaeger at bars to being made to feel so uncomfortable in his lab that they abandoned projects in order to avoid working with him. They depict a man who used his stature to coerce women into crossing professional boundaries, and deceived them into believing that he had the approval of senior faculty in doing so.

“I asked the rochester authorities today about certain student-faculty relations and I am in no danger,” he wrote in April 2007 to Dr. Celeste Kidd, one of the complainants, according to a screenshot of a Facebook conversation Dr. Kidd provided to The Times. Dr. Kidd, whom Dr. Jaeger advised at the start of her graduate studies, rented a room in his house for a year, because, she said, he suggested that he would speak poorly of her to colleagues if she did not.

“He made it very clear that to do well in his lab, which everyone was telling me was a good idea, it was not possible to have only a professional relationship with him. That was not his mentor style,” Dr. Kidd said.