With more than 12 years bioinformatics experience and a scientific background in molecular biology and immune-virology (PhD from the Pasteur Institute, France), Abel first mastered bioinformatics tools and code in the early 90s whilst working on viral phylogenetic studies.. After his PhD, he joined the effort at Genoscope (Evry, France) in. ramping up the human genome project, putting in place the automatic gene annotation system for human chromosome 14. In 2001, Abel moved to the European Bioinformatics Institute (Cambridge, UK) where he led the Ensembl comparative genomics team until 2007.. He founded Eagle shortly before graduating from the Cambridge Judge Business School MBA program in 2008.