Ibrahim Cissé 

Ibrahim Cissé was born in Niger and completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2009. After a postdoctoral stay at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris (France), Cissé returned to the USA in 2013 to become a Research Specialist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2014, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he was first an assistant professor of Physics, then he was promoted to associate professor in the Department of Physics with a joint appointment in biology. Ibrahim Cissé joins the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (USA), where he was appointed Professor of Physics in 2021. Ibrahim Cissé is the recipient of several national and international awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, the Young Fluorescence Investigator Award from the Biophysical Society, The Pew Biomedical Scholars, and the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. 

With his approach of combining physics, biology, and chemistry in one department, Cissé aims to deepen the understanding of how genetic information is decoded. He is researching the behavior of individual molecules and biomolecular phase transitions in living cells that result from so-called weak and transient interactions between molecules. Cissé and his team use methods and their know-how from physics to learn more about the biophysical principles that regulate these processes in the genome. Using specially developed, super-resolution imaging techniques, they observe individual molecules and groups of molecules in living cells. This allows them to analyze molecular events when a cell turns on a gene. The techniques can