Dublin-born Samantha Power will be named United States Ambassador to the United Nations by President Barack Obama.Power will be officially appointed to her new position on Wednesday, according to reports.

Power who lived in Ireland until the age of nine, in Castleknock, Dublin, will take over the high profile job from Susan Rice who has been nominated as National Security Advisor.

Her family emigrated to Pittsburgh in 1979 later moving to Atlanta. She was a journalist covering the Yugoslav wars for US News and World report the Boston Globe, the Economist and The New Republic.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction after graduating from Harvard Law in 1999. Her book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” also established her as a noted foreign policy expert.

She was an early supporter of Barack Obama and was a key foreign policy advisor during the 2008 campaign.

However, she encountered major controversy when harshly criticizing Hillary Clinton in  an interview and she was forced to apologize. She has also drawn the ire of the Israeli lobby over her perceived sympathy for the Palestinians.

During the Obama first term she served in the National Security Council as a key advisor on human rights and genocide and is widely credited for insisting on intervention in Libya which removed Colonel Gaddafi.

She is married to Cass Sunstein who she met in the Obama administration and they have two children, Declan and Rian.