Sister Bernadette Cordis, a nurse, has shared her talents and expertise in many ways. She was a hospital and clinic nurse in the Philippines as well as a teacher of student nurses. After fifteen years in a rural hospital in Bangladesh, she continues her nursing ministry in Cambodia,

Sister Bernadette Duggan was born in Boston, MA. After earning her R.N. at Catherine Labouré School of Nursing in Dorchester, MA in 1958, she entered the Maryknoll Sisters. In 1967, she completed her B.S. in Nursing at Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I. and went on to receive her Master's degree in Public Health Nursing from the University of Minnesota in 1969.

Assigned to the Philippines in 1970, she worked in St. Joseph's Hospital in Manapla which was administered by the Maryknoll Sisters. It was a practice facility for students in a bacalaurate program in Bacolod and she enjoyed being the field work guide for the nurses in formation. For the next ten years she worked on the island of Mindanao in the mountains of Upi, Maguindanao with the tribal Tiruray people. She opened a clinic and paramedic training program. By 1984, a fine Tiruray nurse-midwife took over the work.

This allowed Sister Bernadette Cordis to contribute her nursing talents in health services at Maryknoll, NY. In 1989 she was assigned to Bangaldesh where she served with a Maryknoll Sister doctor in a small rural hospital near the reserve for the Royal Bengal Tiger, so they had tiger bite patients. She said if the patients got  to them alive, they could save them because "we had a team where each knew what to do, and immediately."  Actually, most of their patients were women with complications of pregnancy because the Muslim women preferred being examined by a woman doctor.  They had pre and post natal clinics and classes for local traditional midwives. After fifteen years, a Sister doctor of another community arrived and this freed Sister Bernadette Cordis to respond in 2006 to a request for a nurse in the AIDS Hospice Seedling of Hope administered by the Maryknoll team in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

In Nov. 2008 she was assigned to Rogers Community, Maryknoll, NY and is presently working in Out Patient Care as a companion for medical trips.