Kennon Otey
Program and Portfolio Manager
Ballston Lake, NYkennonotey@yahoo.comLinkedIn
Rooms I've Run
Ecovative Design LLC / MyForest Foods
Green Island, NY · 02/2022 to 05/2026
80-person mycelium biomanufacturing company across food, advanced materials, and defense. The world's largest mycelium grower and processor.
R&D Operations Manager (10/2024 to 05/2026), promoted from Pilot Operations Supervisor (02/2022 to 10/2024).
- Ran a multi-program R&D portfolio on Stage-Gate across food, advanced materials, and a DoD defense program, concurrently. Owned experimental design, resource allocation, milestone tracking, and cross-functional coordination across biology, engineering, commercial, and the C-suite.
- Led a 12-person technical team through the transition from pilot to full commercial scale.
- Took the MyForest Foods alt-protein line from 25 to 25,000 lbs harvested and 3,500 packages a week. Built the crew, the operating procedures, and the production systems, under USDA GAP and GMP compliance.
- Managed a single active end to end: the technical narrative, budget justification, compliance, and reporting. Phase 1 into the options phase, building toward Phase 2.
- Owned delivery on a multi-year advanced-materials build for a global OEM, on Forager leather. A commercial lead held the client relationship. I held the build and the schedule, and worked requirements and timelines on client calls.
- Stood up the technical QMS that standardized work across R&D and manufacturing. Reviewed and approved SOPs, transfer packages, and hazard analyses in AssurX.
- Designed and shipped into live operations: grant discovery, hazard analysis, and MSDS and technical-document intake.
- Ran pilot operations at roughly 200 lbs per week across one half-commercial-scale chamber and four concurrent small-scale chambers.
- Plant processing: Grote deli slicer, batch boiling, thermoforming, HACCP development, and USDA readiness.
New England Treatment Access (NETA)
Franklin, MA · 08/2016 to 11/2021
Vertically integrated, multi-state regulated CPG manufacturer running commercial-scale indoor controlled-environment agriculture across cultivation, processing, and distribution. The regulator was a state cannabis authority with weekly rule changes and go/no-go authority over the entire company.
Advanced through three progressively senior roles, technician through R&D Manager, coming up first through production and cultivation.
- Founded the company's first R&D department as its first member. Drafted the physical plan, built the function from nothing, and grew it to a team of 7. Hired and mentored a supervisor and two data analysts.
- Rebuilt a cultivation room that became the enterprise standard: LED lighting, digital logging and control for lights and irrigation, HVAC sanitation, and rolling benches. Roughly 30% electrical cost reduction and roughly 95% yield increase per room.
- Led the root cause work, 5 Whys and fishbone, on manufacturing deviations that recovered $16M+ from product loss.
- Built the S&OP framework from scratch: retail purchasing trends into a demand plan, production capability modeled against rolling batch-yield data over a six-month horizon, Monte Carlo simulation to optimize the plan for revenue, and monthly cross-functional reviews I chaired.
- Built Power BI dashboards and inventory systems tracking 20,000+ units across 10 departments, on a star-schema pipeline from into Power BI.
- Ran the phenotyping program that brought 8 new products to retail through a full 0-to-1 launch lifecycle. Evaluated over 10,000 specimens.
- Rebuilt curing and processing protocols: +7% salable yield, -15% batch variation, and doubled key quality metrics.
- Brought analytical testing in house: FT-NIR spectroscopy for potency, water-activity testing to standardize the drying endpoint, and qPCR assays for disease testing and gender identification.
- Managed vendors: dual-sourced critical raw materials, wrote incoming-quality specs including heavy-metals testing, replaced underperforming suppliers, and independently verified new-supplier results rather than accepting certificates of analysis.
- Handled data migration during a post-acquisition enterprise-system consolidation under Parallel: mapped fields, validated records, and resolved mismatches with each acquired company's native data team.
- As Harvest Coordinator, managed 50 production staff. In Cultivation, owned clonal propagation, hydroponic nutrient formulation, and plant care.
A&M Restaurants (Amelia's)
Stoughton, MA · 08/2014 to 08/2016
Restaurant Manager
- Full operational ownership of a 300-seat fine-dining restaurant: staffing, scheduling, inventory, vendor relationships, and daily P&L.
School, and After
Academic
Associate Degree, General Studies, Yakima Valley Community College.
Self-directed
Google Project Management Certificate. In progress: 4 of 6 courses complete, expected August 2026.
The Great Courses Plus: 13 courses, 324 lectures. Nobody assigned this. Calculus sits next to biochemistry sits next to negotiation, which is what a reading list looks like when it gets built by problems you were not trained for. The service has been renamed twice since, so the links below land on pages branded Wondrium or The Great Courses.
Everyday Engineering: Understanding the Marvels of Daily Life36 lectures · Stephen J. Ressler
The engineering hiding inside ordinary life: residential construction, water supply, electrical power, HVAC, telecommunications, waste disposal, and transportation infrastructure. Ressler built over 150 working physical models for it, and closes by taking apart the 2003 Northeast blackout as a failure case.
- Stephen J. Ressler, U.S. Military Academy at West Point
The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal24 lectures · Seth Freeman
A preparation system for every phase of a negotiation, built around a checklist Freeman calls I FORESAW IT: interests, factual research, options, alternatives, independent criteria. Covers collaborative and competitive settings, hard tactics, and the psychological traps that sit on both sides of the table.
- Seth Freeman, NYU Stern School of Business
Mathematical Decision Making: Predictive Models and Optimization24 lectures · Scott P. Stevens
Operations research done in a spreadsheet: linear and multiple regression, time-series forecasting, data mining, linear and integer programming, decision trees, Bayesian analysis, Markov chains, queuing theory, and Monte Carlo simulation.
- Scott P. Stevens, James Madison University
Introduction to Machine Learning25 lectures · Michael L. Littman
Supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, with Python programs you write yourself rather than watch. Each idea is worked against a real application: medical diagnosis, game playing, spam filtering, and film special effects.
- Michael L. Littman, Brown University
How Conversation Works: 6 Lessons for Better Communication6 lectures · Anne Curzan
Six linguistics-grounded lessons on how the conversational floor actually works: turn taking, when directness helps and when it costs you, and how to say a hard thing without wrecking the relationship. Includes tactics for pointing out a mistake, preparing someone for a no, and asking a large favor.
- Anne Curzan, University of Michigan
Effective Research Methods for Any Project24 lectures · Amanda M. Rosen
How knowledge actually gets produced: experiments and quasi-experiments, survey design and election polling, case studies, focus groups, field research, and ethnography. Then the part most methods courses skip, which is analyzing the data and communicating what you found.
- Amanda M. Rosen, U.S. Naval War College
Critical Business Skills for Success60 lectures · 5 faculty
Five twelve-lecture modules, five faculty, one pass through the disciplines an MBA covers: strategy, operations, finance and accounting, organizational behavior, and marketing. Each module carries its own methods and company case studies.
- Strategy: Michael A. Roberto, Bryant University
- Operations: Thomas J. Goldsby, University of Tennessee, Haslam College of Business
- Finance and Accounting: Eric Sussman, UCLA Anderson School of Management
- Organizational Behavior: Clinton O. Longenecker, University of Toledo
- Marketing: Ryan Hamilton, Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear24 lectures · Michael Starbird
Calculus built from two central ideas instead of from symbol manipulation. Starbird argues a speeding ticket out of the fundamental theorem, which is the point at which the machinery stops feeling arbitrary.
- Michael Starbird, University of Texas at Austin
The Art of Critical Decision Making24 lectures · Michael A. Roberto
Decision making examined at three levels: individual intuition and cognitive bias, group dynamics and groupthink, and how high-reliability organizations stay vigilant on purpose. Cases run from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Daimler and Chrysler merger to the intelligence failures before 9/11.
- Michael A. Roberto, Bryant University
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: How Life Works36 lectures · Kevin G. Ahern
A full first-semester course, built up from amino acids, proteins, and enzymes through metabolism to genes, gene expression, and the molecular machinery of the cell. Assumes high-school chemistry and nothing past it.
- Kevin G. Ahern, Oregon State University
Where Our Food Really Comes From8 lectures · Brad Barnes, CMC
A short walk down the modern food supply chain: how food is grown, caught, moved, processed, procured, and finally cooked, and the economics pushing on every step of it.
- Brad Barnes, CMC, Pure Food Consulting
Strategic Thinking Skills24 lectures · Stanley K. Ridgley
Strategy traced from military campaigns into business practice, organized around conflict, competitive intelligence, and the analytical tools that came out of both: the indirect approach, value-chain analysis, and the four actions framework.
- Stanley K. Ridgley, Drexel University, LeBow College of Business
How to Speak So That People Want to Listen9 lectures · Julian Treasure
Nine episodes on personal communication, built out from the TED talk of the same name. The habits that drain power out of speech, the vocal toolbox of register, timbre, prosody, pace, and volume, and an episode on the physical mechanics of speaking with Jane Majendie.
- Julian Treasure, The Sound Agency
What I Can Actually Use
Asana, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Quickbase (power user and requirements contributor), Google Workspace, Power BI, Excel, SQL, Monte Carlo simulation, AssurX, METRC, Stage-Gate, Lean, and 5S (trained a lead operator to become a 5S trainer). Jira is adjacent and learnable, with limited hands-on use so far.