[5] During his undergraduate degree he was encouraged by Carl Wieman to apply for a fellowship, and spent a summer at Princeton University working in condensed matter physics.

During this summer project he looked at jammed disordered packings, investigating how M&M's arrange in a small volume with Paul Chaikin.

[7] Cissé used various techniques to study jammed packings, including magnetic resonance imaging, but in the end used a much simpler approach - painting M&M's and analysing how many times they knocked into each other.

He moved to Urbana for his graduate studies, and earned his PhD under the supervision of single molecule biophysicist Taekjip Ha at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2009.

He worked as a Pierre Gilles de Gennes Fellow in the joint labs of a physicist, Maxime Dahan, and a biologist, Xavier Darzacq.

[5] Cissé moved back to America in 2013 and was appointed as a research specialist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

[13] His innovation demonstrated that the proteins involved in turning on genes join into a phase-separated droplet before they start to copy DNA into RNA.