When Niger-born Ibrahim Cissé arrived in the United States more than 20 years ago to attend college, he could not speak English.

Last week, officials at N.C. Central University announced that Cissé, a noted biological physicist who graduated from the school in 2004, was named one of this year’s 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellows.

The prestigious fellowship honors talented individuals who “have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” according to an NCCU press release.

School officials noted that Cissé is the third NCCU graduate to receive the MacArthur Fellowship since 2018. Social justice activist William J. Barber II received the award in 2018. Sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom earned it last year. 

Cissé’s success gives further credence to the adage that if one chooses a career path they love, they’ll never work a day of their life.

“I simply, absolutely, love what I do,” Cissé said in the release. “The inspiration is within, driven by the fortune of finding out early what I love and being able to do just that.”

Cissé’s work focuses on the subcellular processes underlying genetic regulation and malfunction. Last month, he was appointed to lead the Department of Biological Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany, according to the release. 

Prior to the appointment, Cissé served as a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and worked as an assistant professor of physics and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Cissé earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from NCCU in 2004 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at École Normale Supérieure de Paris from 2010 to 2012. 

Every step of his extraordinary career has been marked by universal recognition and accomplishment.

The university release noted that Cissé was honored last year for his research with the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with its 2014 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. He was also a Biomedical Scholar for the PEW Charitable Trust in 2017 and named the 2018 Science News “Scientist to Watch.”

“Dr. Ibrahim Cissé is a revered NCCU alumnus whose research impact is celebrated globally,” NCCU Chancellor Johnson O. Akinleye said in the release. “The honor of being a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellow speaks to Dr. Cissé’s commitment to excellence in research and education and also showcases the academic acumen of NCCU graduates.”

In 2014, Cissé delivered a commencement address to NCCU’s graduating class. He praised the historically Black school and the Durham community for educating “a child from the Saharan Desert” and setting him on a pedestal “of such heights that I never imagined possible.”

Cissé told the newly minted graduates that when he arrived in the United States in 2000 at the age of 17, he was “armed with a simple dream of learning to speak English like Jay-Z and Will Smith.”

After two months of studying English as a second language at UNC-Wilmington, Cissé enrolled at Durham Tech and then NCCU, where by his senior year he and his student colleagues gained international recognition for their discovery of the geometry of an object, random packaging, and density.

Cissé used his favorite candy, chocolate M&Ms, during the scientific process.

“I call that Eagle ingenuity,” he told the graduating class.

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Follow Durham Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald on Twitter or send an email to tmcdonald@indyweek.com.