Elisabeth Quin interviews Françoise Combes

Elisabeth Quin, journalist and writer, presenter of the Arte program 28 minutes, is leading a series of interviews this year at Les Franciscaines on inspiring women. For this first event, she invites astrophysicist Françoise Combes.

An astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, Françoise Combes was deputy director of the physics laboratory at the École normale supérieure from 1985 to 1989. President of the French Astronomy and Astrophysics Society (2002-2004), she also directed the CNRS Galaxies national program (2001-2008). She has held the Galaxies and Cosmology Chair at the Collège de France since 2014, and has been editor of the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003. Her research activities
are devoted to the formation and evolution of galaxies, in a cosmological context. Through her numerical simulations, she was the first to discover the mechanism by which bulges form in spiral galaxies, through vertical resonances of stellar bars. She also pioneered molecular absorptions in front of distant quasars, leading to constraints on the variation of fundamental constants. Françoise Combes was awarded the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal and the 2021 L'Oréal-Unesco International Prize for Women in Science.