---

“How have you achieved so much at your age?”

Ellora McTaggart hears versions of that question often. At 22 years old, the UNC-Chapel Hill alumna became the co-founder and CEO of a wearable technology startup.

A western North Carolina native, McTaggart, now 24, admits she has a habit of seeking experiences that offer the greatest learning opportunity. That drive led her to the NC School of Science and Mathematics and the joint biomedical engineering program at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State University, where she leaned into curiosity and complex problem-solving.

But throughout school, timed tests often kept her from fully demonstrating what she knew. She remembers handing in exams with blank answers — not because she didn’t understand the material, but because the format didn’t match how she processed information.

University research felt different. It rewarded curiosity, exploration, and creative thinking rather than speed. In that environment, McTaggart flourished.

Then, during her sophomore year at UNC-Chapel Hill, she was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“My diagnosis helped me understand my experience,” McTaggart says. “For years, I felt like I had to work harder than everyone else while being evaluated by a system that did not match how my brain works.”

Today, as the co-founder of a new biotech startup called Carolina Instruments, she hopes to help others identify and understand their needs sooner.

In her junior year, McTaggart began working with Carolina professors Nicolas Pégard and Jose Rodríguez-Romaguera to help develop wearable biosensing glasses that offer insight into how people respond to the world around them.

Their latest prototype looks like an ordinary pair of black-rimmed glasses, aside from a few pieces of metallic hardware along the bridge and inside the frames. This unassuming device is an eye-tracker that combines biomedical engineering and neuroscience to support research into the neural networks that regulate human behavior.

Unlike traditional eye‑trackers that rely on cameras and video processing, these glasses use Pupil‑Light technology — a compact, camera‑free system that detects subtle changes in pupil size and eye movement by converting light signals directly into measurements.

“The eyes give us a window into how people experience the world,” McTaggart says. “My hope is that making pupil measurements more accessible will add context beyond performance-based assessments, which often don’t tell the full story.”

In August 2024, McTaggart, Pégard, and Rodríguez‑Romaguera founded Carolina Instruments to advance this technology for translational research and wider commercial applications.

Seeing an opportunity

Traditionally, scientists study neuropsychiatric conditions such as ADHD, depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by observing visible changes in behavior. But shifts in pupil size and eye motion often appear first.

As people enter heightened or reduced states of arousal — alertness, readiness, or excitement — their pupils respond in ways that reflect neuronal signaling in key brain regions. These signals can shape behavior before it becomes outwardly apparent.

“We’re trying to identify the neural circuits that modulate arousal, which then go on to modulate behavior,” Rodríguez-Romaguera explains. “To do that, we need to be able to record and track internal bodily states before behavior happens.”

The long-term vision is that people could put on the glasses to capture subtle changes in their pupil size and eye motion patterns — information that could have meaningful implications for mental health research.

Because pupil dynamics are tightly linked to arousal, they can offer real-time insight into changes associated with stress and engagement. Capturing those patterns outside the lab could provide richer behavioral context than observation alone.

“My dream as a mental health scientist is to have an actual impact in the clinic,” Rodríguez-Romaguera says. “The minute I realized we had a device that could potentially do that, I knew we needed to explore the commercial side in parallel to our scientific pursuits.”

McTaggart first heard about Pupil-Light technology during her sophomore year, when Pégard gave a guest lecture to her class on optical engineering and holographic design. Enthralled by his research, she approached him after his talk and the two discussed his broader work.

Pégard had partnered with Rodríguez-Romaguera to develop the pupil-tracking technology, with the goal of translating it into a wearable device. McTaggart immediately recognized its potential. As a biomedical engineering student, she was drawn to the idea of building a tool that could advance the understanding of the human brain.

She soon engaged in research across both labs, building initial prototypes of the pupil-tracking device for animal models and eventually wearable glasses for humans. She was later promoted to lab manager and began to see the project’s commercial possibilities take shape after graduating in May 2023.

“I realized that I could either take the project and turn it into a high-impact paper in a PhD program, or I could prove to Jose and Nico that I was capable of running the company,” McTaggart says.

Taking the lead

McTaggart chose the latter. She began working methodically toward turning Carolina Instruments into a viable company, immersing herself in the world of startups and industry. She developed a business plan to license the Pupil-Light IP from the university and initiated deeper conversations with Pégard and Rodríguez-Romaguera about what they would need to succeed.

“I can’t think of a specific instance where I went into their offices and said, ‘I want to run this.’ I just made myself indispensable,” she shares.

Eventually, the team assembled everything needed to formally launch the company with McTaggart at its helm.

UNC-Chapel Hill has proved instrumental in the company’s early success. McTaggart turned to KickStart Venture Services at Innovate Carolina, which helps student and faculty innovators create companies built on university research.

Through Kickstart, she participated in industry workshops, received grants to support early commercialization efforts, and validated customer interest. The program also connected her with an advisory group of more than 40 medical technology specialists, investors, and serial entrepreneurs who helped her sharpen the company’s pitch and strategy.

“Beyond the direct support, tapping us into the academic entrepreneurship ecosystem has been incredibly valuable,” McTaggart says. “We have some unique challenges as a university spinout and KickStart has helped us navigate them.”

Outside the university, she immersed herself in North Carolina’s biotech and startup community. She attended networking events, cold-contacted industry leaders on LinkedIn, built a growing network of mentors and advisors, secured an NC IDEA grant, and engaged in a business accelerator program to help move the company forward.

“For the first six to eight months, my mindset was to be a sponge. I wanted to learn as much as I could and meet as many people as I could,” she says. “That curiosity has stayed with me, and it’s been a big part of how we’ve established ourselves in the local startup community.”

As McTaggart absorbed business and fundraising insights, she brought that knowledge back to Pégard and Rodríguez-Romaguera.

“We started out as her mentors, and now she knows more about the industry than we do,” Rodríguez-Romaguera says. “She’s now the one advising us.”

McTaggart admits the shift initially took some adjustment, especially when sharing ideas that challenged her former mentors’ academic instincts.

“I am really appreciative of them for being so open and trusting,” she says. “They know I’m making decisions with the intent of getting this technology off the ground.”

Looking toward the future

The team recently secured their largest grant to date: a $400,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Institutes of Health, led by McTaggart as principal investigator. This funding will support further development of the device’s animal model for translational research customers, informing continued progress on the human version of the technology.

 “As virtual and augmented reality devices advance, eye-tracking is becoming an essential feature,” McTaggart says. “Integrating pupil-tracking technology into smart eyewear could scale this capability to far more people, without requiring us to build and distribute the end device.”

Pupil‑Light’s camera‑free design dramatically cuts the data processing and power required for wearable eye‑tracking — a key advantage for extending battery life in immersive‑reality headsets. As major companies continue acquiring developers of alternative optical‑tracking technologies, McTaggart sees a similar path as a promising future for Carolina Instruments.

“Our north star is better behavioral insights,” McTaggart says. “If integrating our technology into an existing platform is the most effective way to deliver broader access, then that’s the path we will prioritize.”

Because building and scaling a regulated hardware platform is resource‑intensive, McTaggart believes the technology is best suited for a company or partner that shares her long‑term vision: integrity, responsible use, and meaningful benefit to users.

Regardless of what the future holds for Carolina Instruments, she has found her calling in entrepreneurship.

“This is my space. These are my people,” she says. “Building a company takes persistence, and I’m grateful to be surrounded other founders that keep showing up to tackle hard problems and realize their visions.”