Astrophysicist at the Observatoire de Paris - PSL, Françoise Combes was deputy director of the physics laboratory of the École normale supérieure from 1985 to 1989. She was president of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics (2002-2004) and directed the National Galaxies Program of the CNRS (2001-2008). She is a professor at the Collège de France, holder of the chair Galaxies et Cosmologie since 2014. She is 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 allowing the formation of bulges in spiral galaxies, through vertical resonances of stellar bars. She also pioneered the molecular absorptions in front of distant quasars, leading to constraints on the variation of fundamental constants. She received the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal as well as the 2021 L’Oréal-Unesco International Prize for Women in Science.
Alain Fischer, physician, professor of pediatric immunology, former director and co-founder of the Imagine Institute of Genetic Diseases, was vice-president of the Academy of Sciences in 2022.
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