François Hammer, born on 19 November 1958, is a French astrophysicist. He has been an astronomer at the Paris Observatory since 1987 and was an astronomer attached to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope between 1991 and 1992. He has made several discoveries in the fields of gravitational lensing, cosmology and galaxy formation and structure. He was responsible for the Giraffe spectrograph implemented in 2002 at the Very Large Telescope (VLT). Together with the astronomers Lex Kaper, Per Kjaergaard, Roberto Pallavicini, he was the investigator of the X-shooter spectrograph, implemented in 2009 at the VLT. Source: Wikipedia (en)