Françoise COMBES CNRS Gold Medal 2020
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Françoise Combes, winner of the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal
The 2020 CNRS Gold Medal has been awarded to astrophysicist Françoise Combes, a researcher at the Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics and Atmospheres and professor at the Collège de France.
A specialist in the dynamics of galaxies, Françoise Combes has identified numerous phenomena that explain their formation and evolution. Currently a professor at the Collège de France, she does her research at the Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics and Atmospheres (Lerma; Observatoire de Paris – PSL / CNRS / Sorbonne Université / Université de Cergy-Pontoise).
Françoise Combes’ research looks generally at the formation and evolution of galaxies, from their dynamics to their structure, and at interactions between them, by means of direct observations but also numerical simulations. Her work has provided an understanding of the relationship between the shape of galaxies and their history, and has therefore led to the decoding of different stages of galaxy growth throughout the history of the Universe. She has also shown that the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies slow down star formation within those galaxies.
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