Ibrahim Cissé is currently Director in Max Planck Gesellschaft, heading the Department of Biological Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology & Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. Prior to this he was Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and before, an Associate Professor with Tenure in Physics (& Biology by courtesy) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his Bachelor in Physics in 2004 from North Carolina Central University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December 2009. He moved to Paris from 2010 to 2012, where he was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Ecole Normale Supérieure. He moved back to the US in 2013, as a Research Specialist at the HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus before joining MIT in 2014 as a junior faculty. His research on single molecule and super-resolution imaging has been recognized through many honors including being named a Pew Biomedical Scholar, an NIH Director’s New Innovator awardee, Science News “SN10 Scientists To Watch”, a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedicine, and a MacArthur Fellow.