Dr. Carlos Fernando Buen Abad Najar

Dr. Carlos Fernando Buen Abad Najar

Dr. Carlos Fernando Buen Abad Najar

Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics and Biochemistry

Email: cbuenab@clemson.edu

Biosketch

Dr. Buen Abad completed his Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2015. He then earned his Ph.D. in Computational Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, where he developed new methods for studying RNA splicing in single cells at Dr. Liana Lareau’s and Dr. Nir Yosef’s labs. He continued his scientific research as a postdoctoral scholar in the labs of Dr. Yang Li and Dr. Matthew Stephens at the University of Chicago, where he led research on the genetic and regulatory impact of alternative splicing on gene expression and developed reference-free methods to integrate large-scale data for studying RNA regulation. Dr. Buen Abad joined the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry and the Institute for Human Genetics at Clemson University as an Assistant Professor in 2026.

Research

Post-transcriptional RNA processing plays a crucial role in shaping the transcriptome and in linking genetic variants with disease, but our understanding of its regulatory roles remains limited. Our previous research demonstrated that RNA regulation, such as alternative splicing coupled with nonsense-mediated decay, intron retention, and alternative polyadenylation, has a global impact on gene expression levels and drives complex traits. The Buen Abad lab develops interpretable, reference-free computational methods that integrate population-level multi-omics and single-cell data to uncover the genetic and molecular RNA regulatory mechanisms that shape the transcriptome and its impact on gene expression, with a focus on decoding the RNA regulatory mechanisms that drive neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS.

Selected Publications

• Buen Abad Najar CF*, Feng R*, Dai C*, Fair B, Hauck Q, Li J, Cao X, Dey K, De Jager P, Bennett D, Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project Functional Genomics Consortium, Liu X, Wang G^, Li YI^. Genetic and functional analysis of unproductive splicing using LeafCutter2. Accepted in Nature Genetics (in press).
• Cao X, Sun H, Feng R, Mazumder R, Buen Abad Najar CF, Li YI, De Jager P, Bennett D, The Alzheimer’s Disease Functional Genomics Consortium, Dey K^, Wang G^. (2025). Integrative multi-omics QTL colocalization maps regulatory architecture in aging human brain. medRxiv.
• Fair BJ*, Buen Abad Najar CF*, Zhao J, Lozano S, Reilly A, Mossian G, Staley JP, Wang J, Li YI. (2024). Global impact of aberrant splicing on human gene expression levels. Nature Genetics 56, 1851–1861.
• Buen Abad Najar CF, Burra P, Yosef N^, Lareau LF^. (2022). Identifying cell-state associated alternative splicing events and their co-regulation. Genome Research 32, 1385.
• Buen Abad Najar CF, Yosef N^, Lareau LF^. (2020). Coverage-dependent bias creates the appearance of binary splicing in single cells. eLife (9): e54603.

* indicate co-first authors. ^ indicate co-corresponding authors.

For a full and updated list of publications, please refer to: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PWFEnmQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao