Less than five years after becoming the most senior woman in Irish broadcasting, Ms Helen Shaw is stepping down as director of RTÉ Radio. She is taking up a one-year international fellowship in Harvard University.
The fellowship is in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, a research centre within the university which has 200 graduate and undergraduate students and every year selects 20 fellows through competition.
They are chosen from non-academic international leaders to work on aspects of international affairs and development.
Ms Shaw is the first Irish woman to be selected, and has obtained a scholarship from the International Women's Forum to help her participate.
She is a member of its Irish chapter, whose Irish patron is the President, Mrs McAleese.
The research topic Ms Shaw will undertake as Weatherhead fellow is US and European foreign and international relations following the September 11th attacks.
The RTÉ position she vacates will be publicly advertised shortly.
In a statement announcing her departure, RTÉ's director-general, Mr Bob Collins, said: "During her period as director of radio she has shown remarkable commitment and has never failed to "put the audience first".
"A particular highlight of this part of her career was the launch of Lyric FM and we all share her sense of pride in the achievements of this newest of RTÉ's radio channels."
Ms Shaw presided over five years in which RTÉ radio lost some listeners, but generally held its own in an increasingly competitive environment.
Today FM, in particular, nibbled away at RTÉ's listenership in the evening drive-time slot, and local stations consolidated their audiences, reducing RTÉ's share to 47 per cent of the national audience by June of last year.
RTÉ fought back with revamped schedules and with the new station, Lyric FM.
In September 1997 Ms Shaw surprised media observers by defeating 22 other candidates to win the top job in Irish radio at the comparatively young age of 35. She had been a radio producer at the station, but 20 months earlier had left to join the BBC in Northern Ireland as editor of radio current affairs.
Before joining RTÉ she had worked as a reporter with The Irish Times.
Her tenure as head of RTÉ radio was not without controversy, as she presided over schedule changes which sometimes involved upsetting individual presenters.
She was not unaffected by reactions to this, and has spoken publicly about the difficulties women in management positions encounter.
She told a seminar on women in business in 1998: "If you are tough they will remove any vestige of feminity and if they detect any feminity they will conclude you do not have the balls for the job."
She had been described as "the midget from hell", she told this audience, and because she was single and childless had been regarded as work-obsessed and without a social life. Her friends point out that she has a close relationship with her family and the group of friends she has built up.
She urged her audience on that occasion to redefine life "beyond the glass ceiling" as a hospitable place for both sexes and in particular for working parents.
"Part-time working, job-sharing and flexible working arrangements have to be put on the agenda if women are to become fully involved in the workplace and if any real balancing of parenting and work is to be achieved," she said.
Ms Shaw was an Irish governmental observer at South Africa's inaugural multiracial elections in 1994 and Ethiopia's first free elections and war crimes trials.