Mary Anne Hobbs announced on Friday that she's quitting her popular Radio 1 show Experimental (formerly The Breezeblock) after 14 years to be a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. It's a typically dramatic and decisive gesture from someone who has carved out her own niche throughout a mindboggling career.

I grew up reading Hobbs in NME in the mid to late 80s. It was pretty much the magazine's last great era, and she held her own in the boys' club of Stuart Maconie, David Quantick, Danny Kelly, Andrew Collins and Steve Lamacq, writing cover features on Nirvana and Happy Mondays. I enjoyed her DJing and confrontational interviews on Xfm and Radio 1, where as well as playing brutally extreme guitar music, she was the only person bar her mentor John Peel to feature records from the odder corners of electronica.

I only began to realise just how much she had achieved when our paths crossed in 2005 thanks to the emerging sound of dubstep. I championed its bass throb in my small way in the press, but Hobbs gave the localised scene an almighty boot up the arse, sending it global to a degree no comparable UK underground genre has ever managed.

Watching Hobbs shepherd a fledgling scene to the point where its core artists are producing Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg and Rihanna was impressive enough. But as I got to know (and interview) her, I realised she escaped an abusive home at 16 to live in a car park with a hard rock band because "that's how you became a music writer". She has the strength of character to stare down John Lydon and charm Chuck D, and counts Jeremy Paxman and Chris Morris as friends.

Hobbs is not giving up music evangelism – she still DJs around the world with the energy of someone half her age – and Radio 1 has not announced what will happen to her programme, so the ramifications of her move are not clear yet. But there's no question that, like everything else she's done, her departure will stir things up for a lot of people on a surprisingly large scale.