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Françoise Combes elected head of the French Academy of Sciences

19 December 2024 Françoise Combes elected head of the French Academy of Sciences

Françoise Combes, an astrophysicist at the Observatoire de Paris - PSL and Professor at the Collège de France, was elected President of the Académie des Sciences for 2025-2026 on December 17, 2024, having previously served as Vice-President.

Françoise Combes, who has held the Chair of Galaxies and Cosmology since 2014, succeeds Alain Fischer and becomes the second woman to preside over this illustrious institution, after Marianne Grunberg-Manago nearly 30 years ago. The results of the recent elections will shortly be ratified by an official decree from the President of the Republic.

The results of the elections that have just taken place will shortly be ratified by official decree of the President of the Republic.

Biography

An astrophysicist at Paris Observatory, Françoise Combes was deputy director of the physics laboratory at the École normale supérieure from 1985 to 1989. She was President of the Société française d’astronomie et d’astrophysique (2002-2004) and headed the CNRS National Galaxies Program (2001-2008). She has been Professor of Galaxies and Cosmology at the Collège de France since 2014. She has been editor of the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2003. Her research focuses on 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. She was awarded the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal and the 2021 L’Oréal-Unesco International Prize for Women in Science.