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Onder Albayram PhD

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(843) 876-2217

albayram@musc.edu

68 President Street, Bioengineering Building, Charleston, SC 29403 Room Office: BEB414 Laboratory: BEB431

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Rank
  • Associate Professor
College
  • College of Medicine
Department
  • Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Academic Focus
  • Circuit Reserve Across Development and Aging
  • Neurovascular Repair and Metabolic Flexibility
  • Human Brain-Border Clearance
Faculty email addresses should not be used to seek medical advice or to make medical appointments. Please visit MyChart for medical appointments or to contact your provider.

Locations

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Biography

The Albayram Laboratory investigates the biology of brain resilience: how biological time shapes the brain’s capacity to adapt to injury, aging, and disease, and determines whether challenged systems return toward homeostasis or transition toward persistent vulnerability. Our program is organized around three interacting biological capacities that operate across development, aging, and brain injury: circuit reserve, neurovascular repair, and brain-border clearance.

1. Circuit Reserve Across Development and Aging: We define how neural circuits establish and maintain the capacity for adaptive reorganization across the lifespan. In the developing brain, we determine how pediatric TBI redirects complement-dependent synaptic maturation toward premature elimination of functional synapses and loss of developmental reserve. In the aging brain, we define how endocannabinoid signaling governs the maintenance, loss, and restoration of hippocampal plasticity as neuromodulatory tone and molecular state change over time.

2. Neurovascular Repair and Metabolic Flexibility: We determine how endothelial metabolic flexibility governs the capacity of the neurovascular unit to adapt and repair after brain injury. Our work defines how substrate utilization, fatty-acid-dependent mitochondrial metabolism, and endothelial state interact with reparative demand to distinguish productive adaptation from compensatory or maladaptive vascular responses across aging and TBI.

3. Human Brain-Border Clearance: We define how specialized human meningeal lymphatic pathways support fluid exchange, immune surveillance, and extracranial drainage, and how these functions are remodeled by aging, TBI, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and neurodegenerative disease. By integrating in vivo human imaging with anatomically resolved postmortem tissue, biofluids, and spatial molecular analysis, we determine how regional brain-border architecture relates to impaired clearance, neuropathology, and chronic vulnerability.

Across these three capacities, a common translational strategy connects causal biology to human disease and recovery. Experimental systems establish causal relationships in circuit, vascular, and brain-border biology, while deeply characterized human brain, dura, cerebrospinal fluid, serum, vascular tissue, and neuropathologically verified TBI, CTE, Alzheimer’s disease, and matched control specimens establish human relevance. Spatial and single-nucleus biology, neurovascular physiology, ultrastructure, epigenomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and integrated bioinformatics resolve these states across molecular, cellular, and tissue scales. Together, this platform asks a common question: when does a biological response remain adaptive, when does it transition toward persistent vulnerability, and where does that transition remain therapeutically reversible?

Selected Publications