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When Jennifer Hintzsche, M.S. ’10, Ph.D. ’14, couldn’t afford the costly infertility option doctors presented to her after being diagnosed with unexplained infertility, she made her own sterile intracervical insemination kit and tried it at home. During the second month of use, she conceived her first child, Lois.

“I dug into the scientific research and found a non-invasive solution with limited studies showing it had the same live birth rate as the clinical treatment I couldn’t afford,” Hintzsche said. “I immediately went into problem-solving mode and used my NIU bioinformatics education to build my own.”

One day, burnt out from her career as director of product management in the health-tech sector, she said to her husband, Ryan Westphal, ’08, “What if we made ‘Lois-makers’ available for everyone to try?”

In December 2023, the same kit Hintzsche used to conceive Lois was FDA-cleared under the brand name PherDal, the company she founded and now serves as CEO. PherDal has three patents for sterile, at-home insemination. The kit’s key differentiator from other devices on the market is bypassing bacterial interference in the reproductive tract which has been linked to infertility. The kit currently sells for $199 and costs roughly $10K less than what Hintzsche was told her in-office solution would cost.

“PherDal is pronounced fertile but spelled with a Ph.D. out of spite. They told me I wouldn’t be a mother. I used my Ph.D. to prove them wrong.”
– Jennifer Hintzsche, PherDal Founder and CEO

Almost a year after her FDA approval, in October 2024, PherDal was named one of “The Best Inventions of 2024” by TIME.

“The CEO of our PR team called me and asked if I was sitting down,” Hintzsche recalled. “She said, ‘You’re one of TIME’s best inventions of the year,’ and then I remember us both screaming and jumping up and down and crying. I mean, what an absolute honor it is to be chosen by such a prestigious company and recognized in this way. It means so much to me, to the people who invested in the idea of PherDal, and really, it means so much for women’s health.”

Hintzsche said the news spread quickly, PherDal’s website was flooded with traffic and her inbox was filled with messages. She is honored to be recognized on a national level, but still, nothing beats hearing from parents whose babies her device helped conceive.

“Our PherDal baby is on the way! Almost three years and literally once with PherDal. I’m shaking and can’t believe this is real. You went above and beyond to answer every question we had, and seriously, we can’t thank you enough. I’m sending you ‘bumpdates’ every week!” – Infertile Nurse turned PherDal Mom, San Diego, CA

In addition to being recognized by TIME, Hintzsche was honored as one of Inc. Magazine Female Founders 500. She was featured in Forbes, Fox News, Motherly, and Business Insider and earned additional recognition, including the “Best Innovation” award at the 2024 FemTech & Consumer Health Summit. She was awarded a HardTech Development Fellowship at mHUB in Chicago. PherDal was selected as one of the top 200 innovative companies globally to join the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition.

At the 2025 South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference, Hintzsche spoke on a panel discussing how “spite tracking” is moving the needle in women’s healthcare. “Spite tracking” is a term used to describe a trend of women using health apps or wearable diagnostic tools to validate their health concerns after years of feeling dismissed by healthcare professionals. She was also one of five health and biotech category conference finalists for the SXSW Innovation Awards.

Recently, PherDal partnered with Wisp, a leading women’s health company with a mission to make sexual and reproductive healthcare more inclusive, cost-effective and accessible. PherDal kits are now in the lineup of products Wisp can offer their customers.

Driven by the mission to become the most trusted fertility brand, Hintzsche seeks the right investors to help PherDal scale and execute her larger vision.

“The PherDal Kit is our flagship product that will lead a suite of science-backed fertility solutions for every person who is struggling to conceive,” Hintzsche said.

She remains hopeful when looking at a framed academic journal article that she hung up in her office after graduating from NIU. The article, about her Ph.D. dissertation on sequencing the petunia genome, reminds Hintzsche of what can happen when someone takes a chance on you.

Hintzsche earned a master’s degree in bioinformatics from NIU and was the first student to earn a Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Northern. The late Drs. Thomas Sims and Mitrick Johns were two of Hintzsche’s favorite professors. She said Sims saw something in her that others didn’t and encouraged her to try new things, and Johns taught her to think more critically, pushing her to defend her science and think bigger.

“Dr. Johns gave me the best compliment I’ve ever received,” Hintzsche said. “At my graduation, he said to me, ‘I wouldn’t ever bet against you.’”

PherDal has the same encouraging sentiment for women across the country—challenging the status quo to change the future of women’s health and betting on fertility.