Since 2011, Ota has been Director (Policy) at the Nereus Program, an interdisciplinary ocean research initiative between the non-profit Nippon Foundation and the University of British Columbia.
Ota lead a study[REF] in 2016 on global seafood consumption by coastal indigenous peoples, which involved building a database of more than 1,900 indigenous communities and finding that coastal indigenous peoples consume nearly four times more seafood per capita than the global average.