Françoise Combes is an astrophysicist at Paris Observatory and a member of the Académie des Sciences. From 1985 to 1989, she was Deputy Director of the Physics Laboratory at the École normale supérieure (ENS). 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 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.