By Ken Shulman

In the middle of her third year as a mechanical engineering student at MIT, Julia Chatterjee ’22 signed up for an Independent Activities Period course in textile design.

In the four-week class, she and fellow MIT students partnered with students at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City to solve a sustainability problem in clothing manufacturing.

“I was always interested in fashion and in making clothes,” says Chatterjee, who currently works in San Francisco at Refiberd, a company developing intelligent sorting technology for textile-to-textile recycling. “But when I arrived at MIT, it didn’t look like there was a lot going on with textiles. The picture looked very different by the time I graduated.”

“There have always been a lot of exciting ideas in textile research on campus,” says Gregory Rutledge PhD ’90, the Lammot duPont Professor in Chemical Engineering. He leads MIT’s Fabric Innovation Hub, a network of MIT faculty, students, and industry thought leaders created to promote promising ideas and technologies from MIT laboratories that can help revolutionize the textile industry.