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Barbara Zvan, 38, is a number cruncher with a difference. Trained as an actuary, she knew even during her years at university that she did not want a career figuring out average client life spans for an insurance company. She saw a role for herself using her skills as a mathematician in the investment industry.

The accuracy and need for that vision is evident in her career path. She has risen from an entry level job as assistant portfolio manager at the $106-billion Ontario Teachers' Pension Fund in 1995 to senior vice-president, asset mix and risk, a role she stepped into two years ago this April at age 36.

Along the way she has been instrumental in getting Teachers involved in such non-traditional investments as commodities and a timberlands portfolio. As if the pressures of a high-profile corporate career helping manage the pensions of 104,000 retired teachers was not enough, she has also found time to start a family.

No easy trick, as any working woman can tell you.

She and her husband Bill Watson, a management consultant, now have a son Liam, 6, and twins Evan and Sophia, 4. The first child meant taking a break of six months; the twins, a year, away from work.

"My job and my children are my priorities," she says. "I can balance both because I have a great husband, a great nanny and delegate both at work and at home. I don't cook dinners, for example. For that I order foods prepared by expert chefs through a web site."

At work it means delegating the nitty-gritty of number crunching to a staff of 25. Her time is best spent these days on policy, strategy and governance issues and working with the Ontario government and the Ontario Teachers' Federation to make the changes deemed necessary to pension fund contributions and benefits.

One of her proudest achievements is playing a role in the creation of a risk analysis model that identified the likely risks Teachers would face over a 40-year span with its investments.

"That model becomes an important tool for both senior executives, board members and individual portfolio managers," she says. "It does not predict what specific investments to make but gives them an idea of the risks the future holds."

Granted, that model did not predict the extent of the current recession. "But then nobody did," she says. Just how Teachers will adjust to its effects is still a work in progress, she says. "It is just too early to talk about specific adjustments we will make or specific strategies for the future."

While her career to date from University of Waterloo graduate armed with a masters in mathematics to senior vice-president at a massive pension fund has been impressive, Ms. Zvan says her eventual goals hold still greater challenges. She would like to run a company of her own.

"Maybe a pension fund," she says. "I would love the challenges of running a company but at the same time I am perfectly happy attending to all the small details as well."