Admiral Instruments designs, manufactures, and distributes electrochemistry research equipment around the world. Our mission is to offer customers what we consider to be the best selection of potentiostats and related electrochemistry products available anywhere. Our wide selection of products caters to practically any electrochemistry or photo-electrochemistry project, including those with limited budgets.

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Two of the co-founders of Admiral Instruments, Mark Sholin and Matthew Dion, used potentiostats in their prior careers developing novel electrode materials for water treatment applications. They were unsatisfied with the high prices or mediocre features offered by other potentiostat companies. Thus, they were inspired to build potentiostats from scratch and created the first Squidstat prototype in 2014 just for internal use. Subsequently, they refined the Squidstat platform for sale to other researchers through a company called MFC Systems.

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MFC Systems first caught the attention of Admiral Instruments third co-founder, Stephen Hung, in October 2015. Stephen, a partner & co-owner of the German company Zahner Scientific Instruments, has many years of experience distributing laboratory equipment worldwide. Stephen proposed combining the well-respected Zennium electrochemistry workstations and 40+ years of equipment manufacturing expertise of Zahner with the innovative low-cost Squidstat potentiostats from MFC Systems to form Admiral Instruments.

Meet Our Principal Team Members

(You can click on their pictures to send them an email)

Mark Sholin spearheads sales, marketing, and operations at Admiral Instruments. He earned his bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Arizona. After graduating, he spent a year as a PhD student at Arizona State University studying microbial fuel cells and membrane biofilm reactors before pausing the PhD to found his first company called Arbsource. Arbsource was formed to scale up the bench-scale microbial fuel cells Mark was developing as part of the PhD program.

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​During his five years as the founder & CEO of Arbsource, Mark led a team of engineers as a Principal Investigator through R&D contracts with the US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and several commercially funded projects. Arbsource was acquired at the end of 2015 by a commercial partner based in upstate New York after two successful projects with them.

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Arbsource's product development required substantial use of potentiostats to collect data. The lack of suitable options inspired the idea to build what eventually became the first Squidstat potentiostat in 2014. Mark co-founded MFC Systems later in 2014 to sell Squidstat potentiostats and was responsible for the company's sales & operations until Admiral Instruments was started in February 2017.

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Apart from MFC Systems and Arbsource, Mark's past industry experience includes water treatment optimization at Arcadis, process control debugging at Honeywell Process Solutions, and analyzing precious metals recovery from industrial sludge recycling at World Resources Company.

Mark Sholin

President

Stephen Hung

Chairman

Stephen Hung coordinates Admiral Instruments' strategic partnerships around the world, notably with Zahner Scientific Instruments in Germany of which Stephen is a co-owner. He earned his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the West Virginia University Institute of Technology followed by his master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas - El Paso.

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After graduation, Stephen worked at Bruker Instruments in Boston as a development and testing engineer for NMR Spectrometers, Mass Spectrometers, and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy instruments. In 1993, Stephen started Bruker Instruments' China office where he helped train the technical support team and established sales & marketing infrastructure throughout China.

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After successfully building out the Chinese market for Bruker Instruments, Stephen transitioned to growing his own instrument distribution company called Universal Technical & Testing Instruments (UATIL) which still continues to introduce cutting edge analytical equipment to customers in China and Hong Kong. Over years of cooperation between Zahner and UATIL, Stephen eventually became a co-owner of Zahner and is responsible for further developing Zahner's international market presence.

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Apart from Zahner and UATIL, Stephen is currently involved in a UK-based company called Syrris which manufactures reactors for chemistry R&D and is a market leader in flow chemistry products. He is also an investor in other technology startups outside of the scientific research industry.

Matthew Dion is the lead developer of Admiral Instruments' Squidstat hardware and software platforms. He has deep domain expertise as to how potentiostats and related instrumentation interfaces with a wide variety of electrochemical systems. Matt also assists with customer support services and spearheads the team responsible for all of Admiral Instruments' internal R&D activities.

 

After earning his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering summa cum laude from Arizona State University, Matt was hired as the first employee of Arbsource in 2012 to develop electrode materials and bioreactors for water treatment applications. Matt subsequently became the Chief Technology Officer of Arbsource and managed a multi-member engineering team through several projects.

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​Matt's four years at Arbsource and subsequent years as co-founder of MFC Systems, where he invented the Squidstat potentiostat platform, included rigorous electrical engineering training. During this period, he gained a strong command of analog and digital circuits, microcontrollers, software programming, and related electronics expertise vital for potentiostat development. Matt also gained substantial experience with AutoCAD, reactor design, and light tooling for prototyping.

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Apart from MFC Systems and Arbsource, Matt previously spent time as an Electromechanical Engineer at a market leading PCB equipment manufacturer designing electronic sensors for inventory tracking. Matt is also published in the Journal of Polymer Science on the topic of thin film polymers.

Matthew Dion

Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Sujan Shrestha

Applications Engineer

Sujan Shrestha, PhD is Admiral Instruments’ Applications Engineer and brings more than 10 years of electrochemistry experience to the benefit of our customers and product development team. He has authored 19 publications in scientific journals, 1 book chapter, and given 12 technical presentations at international conferences. Sujan became a member of the Admiral Instruments team in March 2018.

Sujan earned his bachelor’s degree in General Chemistry summa cum laude from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Connecticut. During his PhD, Sujan worked in the lab of Dr. William E. Mustain on projects including novel catalysts for oxygen reduction in fuel cells, carbon materials for supercapacitors, and fabricating micro-fluidic devices.

In 2013, Sujan joined the City University of New York as a postdoc to study electrodeposition in ionic liquids for recovery of spent nuclear fuel. While there, he discovered a novel phenomenon of ‘light-induced electrochemical instability’ in plasmonic fluids.

After his postdoc, Sujan became an assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut in November 2016 researching aluminum anodes for primary alkaline batteries. This research also included corrosion characterization and evaluation of mitigation methods. He then continued in this role at the University of South Carolina until being hired by Admiral Instruments. Sujan has experience with potentiostats from competitors including Metrohm, Bio-logic, Gamry, Arbin, and eDAQ.