Ibrahim Cissé (academic)
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Ibrahim I. Cissé | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Alma mater | North Carolina Central University University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
| Known for | super-resolution imaging |
| Awards | MacArthur Fellow |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Caltech MIT École normale supérieure (Paris) Max Planck Institute |
| Website | Cissé Laboratory |
Ibrahim I. Cissé is a Nigerien-American biophysicist. He is currently director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics.[1] Previously, Cissé was at the California Institute of Technology[2] as Professor of Physics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Professor of Physics and Biology.[3][4] He has won several awards for his work, including in 2021 the MacArthur Fellowship.
Cissé's research focuses on live cell super-resolution imaging and single molecule characterisation.
Cissé was born in Niamey, Niger. As a child he assumed that he would work in his father's law firm.[5] He became interested in science through Hollywood films.[6] In Niamey there were few opportunities to practise science as his school did not have a laboratory.[5] He was keen to move to America to study, and completed high school two years early.[6] He moved to the United States at the age of 17 to attend college.[5] Cissé studied physics at the North Carolina Central University and graduated in 2004.[5] During his undergraduate degree he was encouraged by Carl Wieman to apply for a fellowship, and spent a summer at Princeton University working in condensed matter physics. During this summer project he looked at jammed disordered packings, investigating how M&M's arrange in a small volume with Paul Chaikin.[7] Cissé used various techniques to study jammed packings, including magnetic resonance imaging, but in the end used a much simpler approach - painting M&M's and analysing how many times they knocked into each other. The result was published in Science. He moved to Urbana for his graduate studies, and earned his PhD under the supervision of single molecule biophysicist Taekjip Ha at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2009.[8] After completing his doctorate, Cissé joined the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He worked as a Pierre Gilles de Gennes Fellow in the joint labs of a physicist, Maxime Dahan, and a biologist, Xavier Darzacq. He also held a long-term fellowship with the European Molecular Biology Organization.[9] In Paris, Cissé developed the single-cell microscopy technique time-correlated photoactivated localization microscopy (tcPALM), allowing for time resolved measurements in vitro. Cissé used transient-PALM to demonstrated that RNA polymerase II forms clusters that deconstruct after their work is done.[10] Until Cissé made this discovery it was assumed that RNA polymerases were stable.[5]
