Elina Berglund Scherwitzl (born 1984) is a Swedish

particle physicist Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standa ...

and entrepreneur who, together with her husband Raoul Scherwitzl, has developed an app to indicate the days when a woman is most fertile. It can be used both for

birth control Birth control, also known as contraception, anticonception, and fertility control, is the use of methods or devices to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Birth control has been used since ancient times, but effective and safe methods of birth contr ...

and for planning a family. The app is marketed as

Natural Cycles Natural Cycles is a mobile app designed to help women track their fertility. The app predicts the days on which a woman is fertility awareness, fertile and may be used for planning pregnancy and contraception. It was developed by scientist Elina Ber ...

, which is also the name of the company the couple founded to produce it in 2013.

Biography

Born in 1984, Elina Berglund was raised in Malmö in southern Sweden. Her father is a professor of medicine, but both he and her mother are entrepreneurs, running several companies together. She began to be interested in physics at the age of five when her father talked to her about the universe. She went on to study engineering physics at the

Lund Institute of Technology The Faculty of Engineering is one of the eight faculties at Lund University in Lund, Sweden, commonly called LTH (after its Swedish name ''Lunds Tekniska Högskola''). LTH has (2022) about 1,500 employees and nearly 10,000 students, of which abo ...

, receiving a master of science degree in 2008. She then spent three years at the University of Geneva, culminating in a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in elementary particle physics in 2011. In parallel with her studies, she collaborated in the ATLAS project at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

, working with a team that would win the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stand ...

particle at CERN. One month after the announcement of

discovery in the summer of 2012, Berglund left CERN as the experiment facility was closing for an upgrade over the next two years. She married her physicist colleague Raoul Scherwitzl and the couple started to think about raising a family. After deciding to stop using the contraceptive pill, she began to analyse her body temperature in order to reveal the days when she was most fertile. "I wanted to give my body a break from the pill," she explained, "but I couldn't find any good forms of natural birth control, so I wrote an algorithm for myself." With her husband's encouragement, this led her to develop a fertility app, suitable for use by any woman. The couple gave up their physics jobs and moved to Sweden to concentrate on developing and marketing the app, founding the company Natural Cycles in 2013. They successfully used the app to plan the birth of their daughter. Although they began to market the product in 2014 with approval from the Swedish Medicinal Products Agency, they ran into trouble the following year when the agency revoked approval, forcing them to remove any reference to contraception in marketing the app. It was only in February 2017 that they finally received approval from the German inspection and certification organisation Tüv Süd, allowing them to market the product throughout Europe. It was the first time a technical device of this type had been approved for contraception anywhere in the world. When asked by Mimmi Rito of Visma whether she intended to spend her life working on the app, she replied: "No, but I think I will always work with something involving data, analysing data, drawing conclusions, applying data to something or other. It does not need to be physical, it does not need to be contraception, but that's the common denominator now, and I think it will always continue to be."

Awards

In 2015, Berglund received the Women in Tech Foundation's Entrepreneurial Award.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Berglund, Elina Living people 1984 births People from Malmö Swedish nuclear physicists Swedish women physicists 21st-century Swedish businesswomen 21st-century Swedish businesspeople Women nuclear physicists Lund University alumni 21st-century women scientists People associated with CERN