Les Edwards (Lead Instructor) 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.

Christopher Kuhnt is Manager Carbon Products Applications in the product development and applications service group at Rain Carbon Inc. He is responsible for customer technical support for coal tar pitch related products and for pilot anode testing at Rain Carbon. He joined the company in 2011 and has worked on a range of different projects including setting up and commissioning of Rain Carbon’s pilot anode test center, high softening point and hybrid pitches for the aluminum industry and various topics related to pitch and pitch characterization. He has contributed to several Light Metals papers and regularly presents coal tar pitch seminars for Rain Carbon’s aluminum industry customer. Kuhnt earned his diploma in chemical engineering from the University of Dortmund in 2010.

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.

Alan Tomsett has over 35 years of experience in the aluminium industry. He received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has worked as a research scientist at Kyoto University, Japan. Tomsett has held numerous technical and business improvement roles in Rio Tinto Aluminium including the Pacific Region and Global Carbon R&D Program Director, and Carbon Technical Manager for the Pacific Region. He is currently technical manager at Rio Tinto Pacific Operations. Alan was Electrode Symposium chair at the TMS 2011 Annual Meeting & Exhibition (TMS2011) and the Light Metals 2020 editor. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of New South Wales/University of Auckland Graduate Program in Aluminium Smelting Technology, and a regular organizer and contributor to the Australasian Aluminium Smelting Conferences.

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’ Light Metals proceedings, and has served as the chair of the TMS Aluminum Committee.