University of Massachusetts grad Audie Cornish, a National Public Radio reporter since 2006, will take over the anchor chair of the Sunday morning news and feature program, the network announced this past week.

Cornish is a 2001 grad of UMass. This fall, she will take over Weekend Edition Sunday from Liane Hansen, who has hosted the show for more than two decades.

The assignment means the end of any late Saturday nights for the new host. In a conversation this week that can be heard on an NPR blog, Hansen notes that her rule on Saturday night -- to ensure a wide-awake start Sunday -- "is to be horizontal by 8 p.m. and unconscious by 9."

Valley listeners may recall Cornish's service with WFCR as an intern while at UMass, a tenure that UMass Magazine described in 2001. Cornish also interned during college with NPR in Washington. While in Amherst, she also worked for campus radio station WMUA.
After school, she took jobs with the Associated Press in Boston and with WBUR, a public radio affiliate.

After joining NPR in 2006, she spent three years based in Nashville covering the American south. Cornish and her husband, former Gazette reporter Theo Emery, moved to Washington in 2009 when she became a Congressional correspondent.
Emery is now a national political reporter with the Boston Globe.

In early April, Emery appeared on a WRKO radio program to talk about the potential of a government shutdown.