Common threads: Materials science student weaves textile passions into research

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Irena Potochny first picked up a needle to sew buttons on felt in preschool, and she hasn’t put down crafts since. Now a student entering her senior year at Penn State, Potochny spends her free time creating upcycled clothing and tackling myriad projects, like 3-D printing her own spinning wheel one weekend this spring semester.

At Penn State, the materials science and engineering major has also found a way to weave her passions into research opportunities.

Potochny is working with Robert Hickey, associate professor of materials science and engineering, to create hydrogel fibers that could someday lead to advances in smart clothing and even robotics and prosthetics.

“I was really glad that I could find a professor within the college who could relate to what I wanted to be doing,” Potochny said. “All of my materials science professors have been very supportive and helpful in guiding me into pursuing textiles, even though we don’t have that specific department.”

Hickey and his lab are exploring how hydrogel fibers can serve as actuators — materials that change or deform when an external force is applied, like electricity used to open or close a part in a machine. Instead, the fibers respond to heat or water, making them attractive as soft, lightweight versions of actuators, according to Hickey.

“We can make these fibers and stretch them to five times their original length and let them dry out and they keep that new form,” Potochny said. “But when you reapply water or heat, they go back to their original length.”

Hydrogel fibers are made up of networks of polymer materials that can swell and hold large amounts of water while maintaining their structure. Potochny and the team push the polymers out of the syringe into a spinning water bath in a process called wet spinning, which creates long fibers made mostly of liquid and polymers, she said.

Potochny said she is interested in how the fibers could be added to other textiles to create smart clothing or potentially things like self-assembling tents or self-inflating flotation devices.

“We are experimenting to try to figure out their applications in responsive textiles,” she said. “We are trying to see if we weave or braid it a certain way, how will that affect the structure of the fiber and how it reacts to different environments.”

Potochny said she hopes to continue working with textiles throughout her career, potentially designing high-quality, sustainable clothing options that stand in contrast to current trends like fast fashion, which draws concerns over its impact on the environment and workers.

“In seventh grade, I watched my first documentary about sweat shops, and that really impacted me,” Potochny said. “I was so much more conscious about where I was buying my clothes, and it also led me into being more focused on sustainability.”

Putting sustainability into practice, Potochny made her own prom dress in high school. At Penn State, she organized a sustainable fashion show as part of the capstone for her minor in sustainability management. The headliner was a dress she made from SCOBY — a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast — or the skin-like substance that forms on top of kombucha when brewing the drink.

The inspiration for the fashion show stemmed from a trip to Belize in 2024 as part of the Green Program, which offers short-term study abroad opportunities centered around sustainability education.

Potochny and other Penn State students helped the Belize Women’s Seaweed Farmers Association plant seaweed and conduct an ecological survey of their land. Seaweed is traditionally farmed by men in the country, Potochny said. But the tradition has faded, and the women are working to revive it in a more equitable way.

“Talking with those women who are self-starters in their own communities, I was really inspired by them,” Potochny said. “They are taking individual action to try to combat a community sustainability problem.”

Potochny said the opportunities for international travel and to conduct research that are possible at Penn State helped her realize she could take her passions for textiles and sustainability and turn that into a career. 

“It all helped me realize that I want to pursue textile engineering,” she said. “The more I read about it and got involved with it, the more excited I became. I’ve just been embracing that and trying to focus on polymer research in my class studies and lab research so that I can be more prepared for textile research in grad school and then in industry as well.”