About
Creathadh Energies is funded with a Phase I National Science Foundation SBIR grant. It was founded to commercialize its founder James McCullagh’s PhD research in vibration energy harvesting originating at the University of Michigan.
Our Goals
We are developing an environmentally friendly wearable solution for athletes such as a heart rate monitor without coin cell batteries and without the need for recharging. It will be powered by the renewable energy source of human movement.
Biography of
James McCullagh
Dr. James McCullagh spent five years in industry as an analog integrated circuit designer for the data channel in hard drives and two years in the product development of datacom products. During his five years at Hitachi, Dr. McCullagh designed analog integrated circuits designs that were included in ~100 million data channels for hard drives. James earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics at Carleton College, a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (MSECE) at Purdue University, and a Ph.D. Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. At Purdue University James regularly taught circuits courses in the professor’s absence as a teaching assistant.
His PhD research at the University of Michigan focused on discrete and integrated circuit interfaces for vibration energy harvesting. This resulted in three published peer-reviewed journal papers. James also received the GAANN national fellowship during his PhD program and won best student paper at the 2012 PowerMEMS conference in Atlanta, GA. His postdoctoral research related to high-power vibration energy harvesting and resulted in two peer reviewed journal papers. In 2018 he founded Creathadh Energies and in 2020 and in 2025 it received phase I NSF SBIR awards.
Mentor-in-Residence
Rich Zvosec
A joint program with the state of Michigan and the University of Michigan provides a company Mentor. Creathadh’s company mentor is Rich Zvosec. Mr. Zvosec has 25 years of experience working with and for startup companies in materials science. Mr. Zvosec graduated with a BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University and an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago.
