Abel is from Jamaica,[2] where he attended Wolmer's High School for Boys. He was encouraged by his parents to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer.[2] He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies, where he specialised in medicine. He completed his doctoral research in physiology at the University of Oxford. He was a medical intern in surgery and paediatrics at the University of the West Indies, before completing his residency in internal medicine at Northwestern University.[3]
Research and career
Abel started a clinical research fellowship in diabetes at Harvard Medical School in 1992.[4] He then joined the faculty at Harvard, where he was appointed co-Director of the fellowship programme at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.[4] He worked alongside Barbara Kahn, with whom who identified the relationship between adipose tissue glucose transporter (GLUT4) and insulin resistance. He was recruited to the faculty at the University of Utah in 2000, first as Assistant Professor and eventually as Professor of Medicine.[4] Abel was supported by the National Institutes of Health to develop a mouse model of diabetes. He studied how glucose is delivered to cells.[5] He made use of conditional gene targeting to induce genetic defects that resulted in heart muscle cells being incapable of taking up glucose.[5]
In 2013 Abel moved to the University of Iowa as Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.[3][6][7] His works on the molecular mechanisms that underpin cardiac failure in diabetes.[3] He has investigated how diabetes impacts the formation of blood clots; with the increased glucose uptake of platelets in diabetic mice promoting overactivation and excess clotting.[8]
