Leading Women in Engineering & Science: Yolita Wildman Nugent, Director, Advanced Soft Systems Integration, Flex

BACKGROUND

As the founder of the Soft Systems program at Flex, Yolita brings electronics, smart textiles and computation together to create new products, digital experiences and functionalities through fibers and textiles.

She helped establish Flex’s Boston Innovation Center situated in the Seaport area near universities and R&D centers. Based there, Soft Systems focuses on smart textiles and novel material processing techniques. It includes an interdisciplinary team of textile, mechanical, and electrical engineers to rapidly prototype next-gen concepts in the medical, industrial and automotive industries.

Yolita’s background in Textiles and Apparel Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned her BFA, supports her passion for human performance and improving quality of life.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Yolita helped the Department of Defense with a ballistic combat shirt innovation program and led the apparel engineering team. Advanced fibers and weaving created a life-saving garment used to protect highly vulnerable areas of the body.

Working alongside MIT, she experienced novel materials that could sense and respond including quantum tunneling composite textile sensors that could be used to detect pressure and blunt trauma and be integrated into soft systems.

Yolita holds several patents in electronic textiles. At Flex, she and her team developed a textile-integrated dry electrode platform that requires no skin-preparation to obtain the bio signals of heart rate and variability, blood pressure trending, blood oxygen, respiration, and body temperature during highmotion activity.

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