As a child in Niger, Ibrahim Cissé would go into a storage room in his family’s home with electronics he had found around the house, take the devices apart to see how they worked, and then put them back together. The future biophysicist christened the room the “Laboratoire de Cissé.”
Today, Cissé is the Class of 1922 Associate Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he runs a laboratory that bears his name. The Cissé Lab uses high-resolution microscopy to study collective behaviors (e.g., protein clustering) in live cells, unveiling “often for the first time, that these clusters exist in living cells.”
“I simply, absolutely, love what I do,” said Cissé, whose awards include the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science and a MacArthur Fellowship. “The inspiration is within, driven by the fortune of finding out early what I love and being able to do just that.”
Cissé moved to the United States when he was 17. He came “armed with a simple dream of learning to speak English like Jay-Z and Will Smith.” He took ESL classes for two months, going on to earn a BS in physics at North Carolina Central University and a PhD in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“If you limit your imagination,” he said, “you are limiting questions you may ask that can lead you to incredible discoveries.”
http://www.icisse.org/
