Kenny Brown was a research technician before starting his graduate studies in the lab of Christine Raines at the University of Essex. For the RIPE project, he worked on the transformation and phenotyping of tobacco plants in the greenhouse and in the field trials, traveling to Illinois each summer to run RuBP Regeneration experiments. He earned his bachelor's degree in marine biology before earning his doctorate, also from the University of Essex, in molecular plant physiology in 2018. Kenny left the project in 2020 to relocate to Norway.