Cicak received an A.S. in Mathematics Science in 1995 from the College of the Sequoias and a B.S. from the University of Southern California in 1997. She performed graduate research at Cornell supervised by Robert E. Thorne. Despite finishing her project in 2004, she only formally defended her dissertation in 2007 and submitted it in 2020. It is entitled Low-temperature Collective Transport and Dynamics in Charge Density Wave Conductor Niobium Triselenide.