Sarah Rowe-Conlon is an Associate Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Originally from Dublin, she earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology at University College Dublin with James P. O’Gara and completed postdoctoral training on antibiotic tolerant persister cells with Kim Lewis at Northeastern University.

She previously served as a scientist at a biotechnology start-up, engineering synthetic probiotic therapeutics for the treatment of rare diseases. Her lab studies why antibiotics fail during infection, focusing on hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae liver abscesses and chronic wound biofilms, and develops translational solutions including ultrasound-enabled drug delivery (“sonotherapy”).

She is the Co-founder of Sonotherapeutics Inc. and was selected as an ASM “New Voices in Microbiology” honoree in 2025; recent senior-author work includes studies in PNAS and Cell Chemical Biology.

Brian Conlon is an Associate Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at UNC Chapel Hill.

He is a Galway native and received his BSc from University College Galway. He then did his PhD on Staphylococcal biofilm formation under Dr. Jim O’Gara before traveling to Northeastern University to study antibiotic tolerance and persister cells under Dr. Kim Lewis.

While there he established that metabolic activity was a major driver of persister cell formation in S. aureus and he discovered that a class of antibiotics called the acyldepsipeptides could kill these low energy cells.

He then began his independent lab at UNC Chapel Hill where he has been studying host-pathogen interactions and how they impact antibiotic efficacy and drive treatment failure.

He is a Burroughs Wellcome Fund investigator in the pathogenesis of infectious disease. He’s an editor at mBio and Science Advances.