Les Edwards is Chief Technology Officer at Rain CII Carbon and is responsible for customer technical support and R&D activities related to Rain CII Carbon’s and Ruetgers’ sales of calcined pet coke and coal tar pitch to the aluminum industry. Edwards joined the company in 1998 and works out of the Rain CII Carbon office in Covington, Louisiana. He has a B.S. from the University of Western Australia and an MBA from Tulane University in New Orleans. Prior to joining Rain CII Carbon, Edwards spent 11 years working in the aluminum industry in Australia.

Jules Côté, a native of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec (Canada), holds a bachelor of unified engineering (mechanical) from the University of Québec at Chicoutimi. Specializing in maintenance, he gathered experience in his native region before coming to Sept-Îles in 1991. Côté first worked as a maintenance engineer at Alouette, and was later assigned to various positions in different plant areas such as vice president of operations.

In 2012, he became vice president of business improvement and asset management, responsible for continuous improvement, technology development, process efficiency and laboratory and technologies, automation and capital expenditure projects.

Robert Higginson is a founding partner of SCCR Group, and has more than 30 years of experience in delivery and operation of aluminum smelter anode plants in senior operations and project roles. He has global experience across a number of world class businesses. His depth in anode manufacturing and utilization, including P&L business leadership, project construction and commissioning, technical management, plus strategic planning and governance are highly regarded. 

Stephen Lindsay has served in numerous technical and managerial capacities at Alcoa over the past 36 years. He has responsibilities that range from control of fluoride emissions to raw materials including alumina, and customer satisfaction with metal purity that span Alcoa’s smelting operations worldwide. His office is based near Knoxville, Tennessee. His articles on fluoride emission control, alumina, metal purity, and other topics have been published in Light Metals, the proceedings of Australasian Smelting Technology Conferences, and the proceedings of International Alumina Quality Workshops. Lindsay was the editor of Light Metals 2011, and has contributed to the TMS Industrial Aluminum Electrolysis Course, the TMS Anode Technology for Aluminum Industry Course, and various other TMS short courses.

Barry Sadler has been involved in the aluminum industry for more than 30 years in a range of positions, but always with a focus on anode carbon technology. He earned his B.S. in metallurgical engineering from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1982 and Ph.D. in metallurgy from University of Queensland in 1992. Sadler has worked in research, production management, organizational development, and corporate technical management for Comalco/Rio Tinto in Australia and New Zealand for more than 20 years. Since 2002, he has been the principal of Net Carbon Consulting Pty Ltd.

Sadler has published widely on anode technology, is a regular lecturer at courses run by the University of Auckland, and has been an invited speaker at a range of conferences and meetings. He was the 2013 editor of TMS’s Light Metals proceedings, and has served as the chair of the TMS Aluminum Committee.

Robert H. Wombles is vice president of global customer technical service for Koppers Inc. He has been with Koppers since 1997, and is responsible for coordinating Koppers’ customer technical service efforts globally, and all technical issues involving Koppers’ line of pitch products.

Before joining Koppers, Wombles spent 22 years with Ashland Petroleum Company in various R&D positions, including vice president of R&D. He has spent 38 years as an industrial chemist, studying petroleum and coal tar derived pitches and petroleum derived paving asphalts. Wombles holds 17 U.S. patents and is the author of many technical papers and presentations.