# Mark Eschbach II

> Multidisciplinary chemist, engineer and software developer in Champaign, Illinois, and co-founder of Epistemion LLC (industrial automation and agentic AI). Curious across many fields, a builder at heart.

**Who is Mark Eschbach II?** Mark Eschbach II is a multidisciplinary chemist, engineer and software developer based in Champaign, Illinois, and the co-founder of Epistemion LLC. Curious across chemistry, plasma physics, software, AI, philosophy and fitness, he is a builder at heart, with 10+ years turning research into working systems.

**What does Mark Eschbach II work on?** He leads plasma-chemistry research on reactors for CO₂ utilization at the Prairie Research Institute (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), builds water-treatment data systems at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, and builds industrial automation and agentic-AI systems at Epistemion.

**What is Epistemion?** Epistemion LLC is an engineering firm in Champaign, Illinois, founded in 2025 by Mark Eschbach II and Pete Norcross. It builds industrial and commercial automation, control-system software, dashboards, custom applications and governed agentic AI. Website — epistemion.com.

**What does Mark Eschbach II write about?** Philosophy, meaning, hope and the forces that shape our world — essays such as “The House We Built,” “Hope as Our Deepest Orientation” and “What We Make” — plus detailed DIY build logs like a scrap-wood sauna and AC-chilled cold plunges.

**How can I contact Mark Eschbach II?** By email (listed on his résumé page) or on LinkedIn. For automation or AI projects, contact Epistemion through epistemion.com.


## Key pages
- [Home](https://personallyabstract.org/): overview, current roles, selected work
- [Résumé](https://personallyabstract.org/resume/): full experience, filterable by science, engineering, data & software, fitness
- [Epistemion](https://personallyabstract.org/epistemion/): the company Mark co-founded — services, founders, how they work
- [Portfolio](https://personallyabstract.org/portfolio/): data and software projects
- [Full text for LLMs](https://personallyabstract.org/llms-full.txt): résumé and every article in one plain-text file

## Writing
- [What We Make](https://personallyabstract.org/writing/what-we-make/) (2026-01-17): Christianity and the occult still quietly shape how the West imagines the future. The curtain has fallen—so what will we build?
- [Hope as Our Deepest Orientation](https://personallyabstract.org/writing/hope-as-our-deepest-orientation/) (2025-08-20): Hope isn’t a mood or a supply we run out of. It’s the forward lean that defines us, and it shows itself in what we do.
- [The House We Built](https://personallyabstract.org/writing/the-house-we-built/) (2023-11-01): We’ve condemned the house our ancestors left us and watched it burn. The question now is what we build before sundown.

## Projects
- [Building a Sauna from Scrap Wood](https://personallyabstract.org/projects/scrap-wood-sauna/) (2025-08-20): A two-person backyard dry sauna built from pallets and free scraps for about $450, and the iterations it took to hit 180°F.
- [Building DIY Cold Plunges](https://personallyabstract.org/projects/diy-cold-plunges/) (2025-09-08): Three home-built cold plunges cooled by a free window AC unit, from an agricultural crate to a horse trough to a barrel that holds 42°F.
- [A Basic Python Fitness App](https://personallyabstract.org/projects/python-fitness-app/) (2025-08-15): My first coding project: a workout-planning tool for personal training clients, built with early ChatGPT in about 30 hours.

## Portfolio
- WaterLog DSR (2026): Field-service platform for commercial water-treatment companies — an offline-first mobile app for techs, web tools for managers, and an invite-only portal for facility customers. Routes, tests, doses, photos, signatures and Legionella compliance. — https://waterlog-dsr.com/
- Adversaria ELN (2026): Block-based electronic lab notebook for solo researchers and small labs — custom blocks, scientific templates, voice dictation and an AI companion that reviews an experiment or proposes the next one. Early research users report 15–25% faster discovery.
- Cozy Prose (2026): A warm, quiet writing app for books, articles and journals — offline sync, voice dictation and inline AI writing help you can accept or reformulate.
- Frostfire (2026): Contrast-therapy tracker for cold plunge and sauna sessions — log hot and cold cycles and see the trends, on phone and watch. Built by someone who plunges in a homemade barrel.
- IWT-DSR — Water Treatment Reporting App (2025): Enterprise-grade, multi-platform app that replaced paper site reports for a statewide water-treatment program — field data capture, reporting and analytics in one place. Cut site-visit reporting time by 50%. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/IWT-DSR-Overview
- Water-Line Database (2025): Fifty years of historic water-treatment reports — handwritten, Word, Excel and PDF — cleaned, OCR’d and unified into one searchable research database. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/Water_Line_DB/blob/main/README.md
- Plasma Ammonia Synthesis Simulation (2025): Simulation exploring which factors drive plasma-enhanced ammonia (NH₃) synthesis — a computational companion to hands-on reactor work. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/Ammonia_plasma_synthesis_simulation
- Water Data Dashboard (2024): End-to-end pipeline that extracts historic water-testing reports from PDF and turns them into an interactive dashboard. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/Water_line
- Crypto Volatility in Emerging Markets (2024): Exploratory analysis and forecasting of cryptocurrency volatility and adoption trends across emerging economies. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/Emerging_markets_analysis
- UV-Vis Spectral Matcher (2024): Desktop tool with a GUI that compares UV-Vis sample spectra against a standard library to help identify compounds. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/UV_VIS_Data_Analysis
- Digital Site Report (Excel) (2023): The Excel-based digital site report that first modernized data capture for the statewide water-testing program — the precursor to IWT-DSR. — https://github.com/Markopolo2023/personallyabstract.github.io/blob/main/data_assets/ipy_nb/dsr.ipynb
- Small-Business P&L Dashboard (2023): Lightweight Google Sheets dashboard that gives a local small business a clear view of profit and loss. — https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mhnU_qQ008RgwuxSNlLrf6lLu9spR5vFXMr-lSLP_Zs/view

## Contact
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-eschbach-648909ab
- GitHub: https://github.com/Markopolo2023
- Company: https://epistemion.com
- Email and phone: see https://personallyabstract.org/resume/