Canberra mother-of-four Lynne Pezzullo has risen to become one of the nation's foremost health economists and, now, the first female managing partner for a Deloitte office in Australia.
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And in between it all she and her husband, senior public servant Michael Pezzullo, have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Muscular Dystrophy Australia by trekking through Nepal and Europe.
She also climbed Mt Kilimanjaro in January, this time for Women's Forum Australia, an independent women's thinktank.
She says work-life balance is critical and she copes by being a master multi-tasker, with a demanding job and four children - Antony, 21; Nic, 18; Charissa, 15; and Sam, 12. She doesn't mind taking work home but understands it's not for everyone.
''Typically, I'll be supervising Sam doing his homework, cooking the dinner, replying to email and having my laptop out. And there are multiple things you can do in the car - legally,'' she said, with a laugh.
She says she does still make a conscious decision to transition from boss to mum on the drive home to Wanniassa.
''I will think about the things I've done during the day, tie up any loose ends, make any phone calls I need to make and then put music on and sing for the last five minutes as I enter into that new role,'' she said.
The gold cross she always wears around her neck also reflects her commitment to her local Anglican church, saying it keeps her ''happy and grounded''.
Deloitte, which merged with Access Economics earlier this year, announced this week it had appointed Ms Pezzullo, 46, as the new managing partner of the Deloitte Access Economics office in Canberra.
Ms Pezzullo is used to breaking new ground. She was also the first female director and then chair of the board of Access Economics. And she made her mark in the usually male-dominated world of economics, working for 10 years in the public sector on issues including foreign debt management in Treasury through the recessionary late 1980s and defence logistics reforms.
But she says she was eventually driven out of the public sector back in the mid-1990s by its then less than family-friendly work practices.
At Access Economics, she found she could work part-time, work from home and be flexible. She helped grow what was then its very fledging health economics arm into a major part of the business and become a player on the world market. She was the Telstra Business Woman of the Year for the ACT in 2008.
She led the field in costing diseases so that public policy could understand the worth of prevention and intervention. One of those reports she did was on muscular dystrophy which ''just broke your heart''. It led to the fundraising for Muscular Dystrophy Australia.
Ms Pezzullo is now in charge of a staff of 138, with 48 staff at its Barton office and 90 at its Brindabella Park office.
For someone who came to Canberra from Adelaide ''for two years in 1987'', Ms Pezzullo is now firmly entrenched in the national capital.
''I love Canberra. I love the seasons. I love the proximity to the skifields. I love the policy-tragic people who live here and believe in building a better Australia,'' she said.
