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Dr. Cheri Nijssen-Jordan (MBA '0 4) has a resume that's longer than most magazines. She acts globally - participating in medical missions to Thailand, Lesotho, Peru and Malawi and she acts locally - volunteering with groups like Inn from the Cold. Nijssen-Jordan sings alto in her church choir, runs marathons, and helps chauffeur her children to a host of extracurricular activities.

And yet showing up for an 8:00 a.m. interview - with only two hours of sleep the night before - she turns down the offer of a cup of coffee with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders.  "I don't do coffee," she says. Now that's impressive.

These days, Nijssen-Jordan is based out of the Alberta Children's Hospital with its primary coloured-façade, sunny corridors and some of the most advanced medical equipment in the country. As a specialist in pediatric emergency care - with 11 years as the emergency director of this hospital - Nijssen-Jordan values the culture of patient- focused care that she and her colleagues have worked hard to create.

As the region's telehealth medical director from 2004 to 2007, she has set high standards for facilitating Southern Albertans' access to health care. A Quality Improvement Physician for Pediatrics, she makes patient safety a priority. "Together with patients and their families, we can make our health system more efficient, more effective and much safer using innovative techniques and teamwork," she says.

Two years ago, Nijssen-Jordan’s medical skills were being put to a much different test. She was living in the impoverished country of Malawi in south eastern Africa - where life expectancy is 40 years of age, per capita income is less than $200, and the HIV infection rate runs at an alarming 15 per cent. Along with her husband and the youngest two of their four children, Nijssen-Jordan had taken a leave from a fairly comfortable life in Calgary and traded it in for a volunteer position with Lifeline Malawi. It became the experience of a lifetime.

Founded by a Calgary family physician, Dr. Chris Brooks, lifeline Malawi seeks to improve the health of Malawians - where a grave shortage of doctors, medicines, and health clinics has translated into some of the world's lowest indicators for health. Brooks' story touched her heart and it didn’t take long before plans were in place for her to take a sabbatical from the Calgary Regional Health Authority and assume the medical directorship for Lifeline Malawi.

In July 2006, the family arrived in Lilongwe, the country's capital, and set up what would be their home for the next six months. The work was intense and days were long. "l got up at 5 a.m. and I finished my day around 10 p.m.," she says. "The bright side was that I was off on weekends for the first time in my career. We went on some incredible weekend holidays and safaris."

While she expected her clinical skills to be tested to their limits in Malawi, she didn’t anticipate that her business skills would be in such high demand. "When I arrived, Lifeline Malawi was on the verge of a spectacular growth curve and we went from serving one region to trying to meet the needs of four. It was a huge leap in terms of staff, resources, and scope - a real-time case study in the organizational dynamics of rapid growth," explains Nijssen­ Jordan. "It was intellectually and physically rigorous in ways I hadn't anticipated."

"Consider the numbers from an operations perspective: ln Canada, a very busy day on an emergency ward would involve each physician seeing 50 to 60 patients. In Malawi, it was common to see 300 patients a day and to have to tum away 300 more - people suffering from serious illnesses like AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. I often think about the people I met and wonder how they're doing, whether they're still alive."

Nijssen-Jordan lives life through a split screen of reality. On one side: The privilege and excess of the first world, on the other side: The despair and suffering of the third world. "Sure, it's a shock coming back here especially since there's no time for a gradual readjustment - I can be seeing patients in a remote sub-Saharan village at the start of a week and seeing patients at the Alberta Children's Hospital by the weekend. I remind myself that parents here care about their children as much as parents there and I try to treat everyone with the same degree of compassion and respect," she says.

In Africa or in Alberta, as a parent of a sick child you'd be lucky to have Nijssen-Jordan by your side. What if you ended up by her side along the militarized border between Thailand and Burma?

“The year before I went to Malawi, a friend and fellow doctor convinced me - quite easily - to join her on a medical mission to Thailand that was being organized by Clinical Service Partners International. We were in an isolated camp in the jungle where neither the Thai government nor the Myanmar Army wished to have outside assistance.  There are few places on the planet as packed with landmines and the paramedics with whom I worked dealt with more extreme trauma cases in ten days than I've seen in ten years in Canada. "

After about a week of being holed up in such conditions, Nijssen-Jordan proposed a stroll in the countryside, perhaps even a trip to a nearby village to meet the locals. "Our hosts were shocked and said it was out of the question. We negotiated until we reached a compromise," she says.

The compromise turned out to be a brief hike - at a quick clip - chaperoned by armed guards. "I was more worried about one of our guards tripping and set ting off his machine gun than I was about the snipers said to be hiding in the bushes."

Let there be no doubt that Nijssen-Jordan is a woman with moxie to spare.

With all she had on the go - on both hospital and home fronts - why did she choose to go after an Executive MBA from the Haskayne School of Business? "That’s a good question," she laughs. "I started thinking about it in the l990s during the restructuring of Alberta's health care system. I felt that, as doctors, we needed a better understanding of the operational and financial drivers of our health care system."

Nijssen-Jordan's decision to enter the Executive MBA program in the fall of 2002 triggered the professional equivalent of a major spring cleaning.  "I took a hard look at all the things I had on my plate and figured out what I needed to keep and what could be put on hold for a couple of years.  It took a significant reprioritizing but in the end things fell into place," she says.

She scaled back her weekly hospital hours from 100-plus to 50, working 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Thursday and directing the extra 30 hours to classes and study. ''An unexpected benefit was that I was home more often - doing my homework as the kids did theirs. We learned a lot together."

The example that Nijssen-Jordan and her husband Peter Nijssen, a planner with a specialty in infrastructure for refugee camps, have set is definitely paying off. Their children are bright, confident and compassionate - with definite opinions about the world that lies beyond Calgary's city limits.

After years of heading south for her medical work, Nijssen-Jordan has recently been frequenting Alberta's north. Starting September 2007, she's been splitting her time between Calgary where she's maintaining her hat-trick role as professor, clinician and researcher and Fort McMurray where she's serving as the vice­president of Medical Affairs.

With all she's got on the go, balancing priorities and passions, Nijssen-Jordan could be forgiven for only thinking about what comes next.  But she's got a knack for making the most of moments. "If I'm not present in the moment - if I'm thinking about what happened this morning or what I've got to do tomorrow - then I've missed it. The best way I've found to prepare for life is to live it."