The Hardo Lab

We are a quantitative microbiology research group at UAE University. We study how individual bacterial cells respond to changing environments and antibiotic treatment—and how those responses can be measured accurately.

Our research combines live-cell widefield microscopy, microfluidics, computational modelling, and machine learning. A central focus is antibiotic persistence and tolerance: why genetically similar bacterial cells can follow different fates, and how their physiology and environmental history shape survival.

We also develop tools for more reliable quantitative microscopy. Our open-source platform SyMBac simulates growing bacterial cells and the process by which they are imaged, generating realistic synthetic microscopy data with known ground truth. We are expanding this approach towards virtual experiments that connect bacterial growth and metabolism to microscope image formation and analysis.

By combining experiments with simulation, we aim to make single-cell measurements more accurate, reproducible, and interpretable—and to use those measurements to understand how bacteria survive stress.

The lab is led by Georgeos Hardo, Assistant Professor at UAE University.