[1] Abel was born on February 4, 1963 in Jamaica,[2] where he attended Wolmer's High School for Boys.

[3] 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.

[5] He made use of conditional gene targeting to induce genetic defects that resulted in heart muscle cells being incapable of taking up glucose.