Professor John Grandfield has 30 years experience in aluminium and magnesium research, development and commercialisation of new technologies in smelting, continuous casting and metal refining, plant benchmarking, and technology reviews. His widely published work on direct chill and ingot casting has been celebrated and awarded both internationally and within Australia. John is regularly invited to give training courses, participate in in-house innovation workshops, conduct R&D program reviews, holds an Adjunct Professor position in the High Temperature Processing group at Swinburne University of Technology and chairs the Australasian Aluminium Cast House Technology conference.

Jim has a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and 34 years of experience in researching the international metals and mining industries.

Until June 2013, he was Chairman of Commodities at Macquarie, having worked for Macquarie for 19 years. He headed up a 10 person research team in London, Singapore and Shanghai which services the equity, LME trading and corporate advisory divisions of the bank with steel, coal, metals and minerals research and market intelligence. Jim and his team at Macquarie were regularly ranked number one in various surveys of commodities research among equity investors for over a decade.

Prior to Macquarie, Jim worked for 10 years at CRU International, where he headed up a team specialising in special steels (including stainless steel) and steelmaking alloys (mainly manganese, silicon, chrome, nickel and molybdenum). While at CRU, Jim also undertook major studies on metallurgical coal and iron ore. Before joining CRU, Jim worked as a marketing analyst at New Zealand Steel.He has also worked as an Associate Director of Metals and Mining Research at Shearson Lehman Hutton Securities.