[9] He went on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded a PhD in 1984 for work on the regulation of gene expression in the Ras subfamily of oncogenes supervised by Robert Weinberg based in the MIT Department of Biology.

[11] In Weinberg's lab, Tabin constructed murine leukemia virus,[12] the first recombinant retrovirus that could be used as a eukaryotic vector.

[10] Following his PhD, Tabin did postdoctoral research with Douglas A. Melton at Harvard University, then moved to Massachusetts General Hospital where he worked on the molecular biology of limb development.

Early in his research he investigated limb regeneration in the salamander, and described the expression of retinoic acid receptor and Hox genes in the blastema.

He clarified how morphogens like Shh orchestrate formation of the embryo, elucidating why the heart is located on the left and not the right side of the body and explaining why the thumb is different from the little finger.