About

Hello! My name is Georgeos, and I’m a researcher in the Bakshi Lab at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. I recently completed my PhD under Dr. Somenath Bakshi’s supervision, and will be starting as an assistant professor at UAE University this coming August.

My research focusses on the use of widefield microscopy for the study of single cell behaviour, specifically that of bacteria. I like widefield microscopy as a tool because of its (relatively) low cost, its simplicity, and ability to generate large volumes of timelapse data when combined with microfludic devices such as the mother machine.

Thusfar my research has focussed on gaining accurate and precise insights from widefield (in my case fluorescence and phase contrast) microscopy data. To achieve this I’ve been building and maintaining a tool called SyMBac, which generates synthetic images of cells growing and dividing under the microscope under arbitrary conditions. Using SyMBac generated images to train AI based segmentation models leads to vastly enhanced precision - this allowed us to reveal a novel width regulation behaviour in E. coli as it enters and exits stationary phase.

My aim is to expand SyMBac into a full virtual microscopy platform, allowing researchers to fully simulate their single-cell microbioogy experiments end-to-end, from the biophysics of bacterial growth, to their metabolic kinetics, to image formation as cells are observed under the microscope. We have demonstrated this capability, and quantified many sources of error which can be introduced by the image formation process which could skew or corrupt biological conclusions.