Dr. Abbas obtained his MD and PhD in Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University.   The focus of his graduate research, under the mentorship of Dr. Bryan Roth, was on serotonin receptors and behavior.  He subsequently moved to Columbia University in 2011, where he completed his psychiatry residency training and postdoctoral work under the primary mentorship of Dr. Josh Gordon, as well as with Dr. Christoph Kellendonk and Dr. Daniel Javitt when Dr. Gordon left to assume leadership of the NIMH.  He joined the Department of Behavioral of Neuroscience at OHSU in 2019.  He is continuing clinical and teaching work as a Staff Psychiatrist at the VA Portland Health Care System, which is connected physically to OHSU, and is also appointed in the Department of Psychiatry at OHSU.

His goal is to understand the link between cognitive deficits and cortical macro- and micro-circuit dysfunction in schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.  In his research, he combines in vivo, high density neural recordings in freely moving mice with optogenetics and advanced computational analysis to study the neural correlates of cognitive functions such as working memory, a prefrontal cortex-dependent cognitive function that is impaired in many psychiatric disorders.  By uncovering the cellular and circuit mechanisms that underlie cognition, he hopes to better understand psychiatric disease processes and identify new therapeutic targets to treat cognitive dysfunction since it is a major contributor to decreased quality of life and poor functioning.