This toothbrush is starting a women’s health revolution

Hormonal fluctuations impact every stage of women’s lives, from monthly shifts around menstruation to the longer-term transformations of pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause and menopause. They can leave a lasting mark on almost every aspect of physical and mental health, but until now, women have had limited tools to decode them.

“What we’re trying to do to is give women a non-invasive way to track these fluctuations over time for a range of clinical applications,” Jaya says.

“FERN is a body demystification tool. Our goal is to unlock the self-awareness women need to be able to live not only healthy and happy lives but rich and flourishing ones.”

Building the foundations of start-up success 

If you’ve learnt anything about Jaya Dadwal thus far, you can probably imagine what happened next: she got accepted to Yale, complete with the University’s prestigious Horstmann Scholarship; met her co-founder, biomedical engineering student Emily Deschenes, within a month of her arrival; and threw herself into building forEVA.  

Nearly two years later, Jaya and Emily are in the early stages of opening their own lab, spinning out of Yale and into industry. Their current focus is on securing the next stage of forEVA’s growth. To that end, Jaya has been working on forEVA as part of Yale’s Tsai City’s Summer Fellowship, a prestigious, non-dilutive funded accelerator program that propels full-time students to full-time founders. Yale’s Tsai Center is the innovation hub where forEVA first started taking shape. 

Jaya is also working on securing the company’s first round of angel funding. As CEO, she spends hours networking, pitching, speaking on panels and attending events to connect with prospective investors who share her passion for women’s health. Her UTS Law degree has been a useful tool in bringing people on board.

“I reference my thesis in nearly every investor call. Investors love a ‘nontraditional founder’. They’re really interested in the fact that I came from a law background and that I was looking at medical malpractice in my professional career,” she says. 

“They appreciate that I also did a lot of research into women's health contraceptive and reproductive device class actions, so I have a good, strong understanding of why a lot of these products went wrong from a legal perspective.” 

Taking an expansive view of the law 

As forEVA continues to grow, supported by a team of UTS Marketing interns back in Sydney, Jaya’s profile as a start-up founder is growing alongside it. But her law degree is never far behind: recently, drawing on her legal expertise and the advocacy skills she gained as part of the UTS Law Mooting Team, she appeared before the Connecticut General Assembly to testify on two bills calling for better endometriosis and menopause support.

This crossover between entrepreneurship and the law has helped Jaya carve a unique professional niche. It’s something she wants other law students to consider, too. Pursuing a traditional law career path is just one way to leverage a law degree. Harnessing those same skills to tackle big, messy, human challenges is another. 

“So much of what lawyers will be paid for in the future is the big picture strategy and being able to take a series of facts or pieces of evidence and spin a cohesive, compelling story. Those skills are valuable everywhere,” says Jaya.