Cynthia Sherry is having dinner with seven gentlemen at a Dallas restaurant. All of them are radiologists, and Sherry is about to become the first female partner of the practice. During the meal, one partner says to her, "I'll bet you’ve never been to dinner with seven men before." If the radiologists think Sherry is uncomfortable with the numbers, they’re wrong.

Having grown up the big sister to six brothers, she is familiar with the boys' club. She and her brothers would often play baseball with the neighborhood kids in the vacant lot behind their house, her dad coaching them.

Knowing how to play ball came in handy, she says, when she decided to become a radiologist, which she found to be a male-dominated field. She persevered, joining Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas.

Wanting to make sure she didn’t practice medicine "in a vacuum," she agreed to serve on a managed-care hospital committee. Her interest in taking a leadership role in medicine led her to Heinz College. She was among 22 students in the inaugural medical management program. "We called ourselves 'The Crash Test Dummies,'" she jokes, as she and her classmates were molded into what she terms "physician executives."

After earning her degree in 1999, she became chair of radiology at her hospital as well as president of the Texas Radiological Society, all while being a partner in her clinical practice and raising a family.

Last spring, the woman not intimidated by numbers was elected president of the American College of Physician Executives, which has more than 10,000 members. She plans to help look for solutions to what she calls the "U.S. healthcare financial dilemma."

Sherry follows in the footsteps of "one of my cohort at Carnegie Mellon," Chalmers Nunn (HNZ'99), who also served as president of the organization.

—KAREN HOFFMANN (CMU'04)