Yolita Wildman Nugent is an apparel engineer, entrepreneur and researcher of advanced clothing systems including wearable electronics. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Apparel Design. She has worked professionally in the apparel industry and in production since 1997. Her interest in technology eventually led her to work on many wearable and textile sensing applications developing out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of this work transitioned to the Department of Defense where she spent several years working on advanced soldier systems and individual equipment. Her wearable work has been featured in Time Magazine’s best inventions of the year, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal. Currently, Yolita is the Director of Advanced Soft System Integration for Flex, located in the Boston Innovation Center where she leads the global textile initiatives for the business segments including health, medical, defense and the industrial customers.
In Boston she is the founding leader of the Flex Center of Competence for Smart Textiles, that has a regional focus on idea generation, design and prototyping for Flex customers. It is here where she has built a team of cross-disciplined textile designers, scientists and engineers that focus on the merger of textile technologies and electronics within a soft-architecture system.