Francoise Combes is a professor at Collège de France, chair of “Galaxies and Cosmology”, and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences. She works at the Paris Observatory on the formation and evolution of galaxies, their dynamics, and their co-evolution with supermassive black holes, as well as on models of dark matter. She has received several awards, including the CNRS Gold Medal (2020), the international L'Oreal-Unesco award for Women in Science (2021), and the Lise Meitner Prize from Göteborg (Sweden, 2017). She was elected a member of the European Academy (2009) and an international member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA, 2023).