Ibrahim Cissé elected EMBO member
Recognition for outstanding achievements in the life sciences for Max Planck Director
Ibrahim Cissé, Managing Director and Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg (MPI-IE), is one of the 60 newly elected members of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2025. The EMBO membership recognizes research excellence and Cissé's outstanding achievements in the fields of biophysics and molecular biology. As an EMBO Member, he joins a society of top researchers worldwide.
Ibrahim Cissé, Research Group Leader and current Managing Director at the MPI-IE, has been elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2025. EMBO is an international organization of life scientists that promotes excellence in the life sciences in Europe and beyond.
The 60 newly elected EMBO Members and 9 Associate Members for 2025 join a network of over 2,100 distinguished life scientists. EMBO Members play an active role within the organization, participating on the EMBO Council, serving on committees and advisory editorial boards for EMBO Press journals, reviewing EMBO funding applications, and mentoring early-career researchers. Through these activities, they collectively contribute to shaping the future of the life sciences in Europe and internationally.
Fresh Energy for the Community
EMBO Director Fiona Watt says: "A major strength of EMBO lies in the excellence and dedication of its members. Science thrives on global collaboration, and the annual election of new EMBO Members and Associate Members brings fresh energy and inspiration to our community. We are honored to welcome this remarkable group of scientists to the EMBO Membership. Their ideas and contributions will enrich the organization and help advance the life sciences internationally."
Ibrahim Cissé is a biological physicist who develops single-molecule super-resolution microscopic imaging and applies it to investigate subcellular processes in live cells. By integrating physics, biology, and chemistry in one department, Cissé aims to deepen the understanding of how genetic information is decoded in our genome. His research focuses on observing the behavior of individual molecules and investigating biomolecular phase transitions that arise from weak and transient interactions between molecules. Leveraging advanced methods from physics, Cissé and his team explore the biophysical mechanisms that control these genomic processes. With specially developed super-resolution imaging techniques, they observe individual molecules and assemblies of molecules in real time in living cells. This enables them to unravel the molecular events involved when a cell turns on a gene. The applied techniques can visualize the dynamic clusters of molecules that form and dissipate rapidly during gene expression.
The new members will be formally welcomed at the next EMBO Members’ Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, on October 22-24, 2025. A directory listing every member with affiliation and subject area is available online.
About Ibrahim Cissé
Ibrahim Cissé was born in Niger and earned his PhD in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) in 2009. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (France), he returned to the USA in 2013 as a Research Specialist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2014, Cissé joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, initially as an assistant professor of physics, later advancing to associate professor and tenured associate professor with a joint appointment in biology. In 2021, Cissé was appointed Max Planck Director and became head of the Department of Biological Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, coming from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he was a Full Professor of Physics. Throughout his career, Cissé has received several prestigious honors, including the 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, a MacArthur Fellowship (2021), an American Physical Society fellowship (2021), and he was honored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York with the Great Immigrant Award in 2022.
About the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a community of more than 2,100 leading researchers dedicated to promoting excellence in the life sciences across Europe and beyond. EMBO supports talented scientists at every stage of their careers, fosters the exchange of scientific information, and works to establish an environment where researchers can achieve their full potential.
Through a wide range of initiatives including fellowships, courses, workshops, conferences, and the publication of scientific journals, EMBO advances the research and international visibility of young scientists and facilitates their mobility. EMBO's activities are designed to disseminate cutting-edge research, provide training opportunities, and set high standards for research practices. EMBO helps to shape science and research policy by seeking input and feedback from its community and by closely following trends in science in Europe. An annual election process for new EMBO members ensures that the EMBO Membership continues to represent a broad range of research fields and adapts to emerging trends.
