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Who We Are
The history of closed captioning is inextricably linked with The National Captioning Institute, the nonprofit corporation created in 1979 to provide the option of television access to deaf and hard-of-hearing communities and subsequently to those learning to speak English as a second language.
NCI’s established importance in the closed captioning industry extends well beyond historical significance, however. For more than four decades, we have used innovation and dedication to lead the way in providing high-quality service to viewers, and ground-breaking technologies to the content providers.
These technological developments have enabled the closed captioning industry to flourish, but it’s our training procedures and practices that have yielded the standard-setting group of professional captioners actually responsible for producing “those words on the screen.”
With a highly skilled captioning staff and state-of-the-art facilities, NCI supplies world-class captioning services, including but not limited to the following:
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As part of our commitment to media and entertainment access, we additionally provide Audio Description services for people who are blind or have low vision as well as live translations in 40+ languages.
Contact Us today or Request A Quote to see how NCI can help ensure your content can be accessed by everyone regardless of viewing platform.
“…we’re so grateful to have NCI…”
CHRIS GEE, GISH | THE GOOD HUNT
Our Milestones
1970’s
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1980’s
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Our Senior Team
Gene Chao
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Chao has been on the NCI Board since 1997 and Chairman and CEO since 1999. Dr. Chao is responsible for guiding the National Captioning Institute’s management team and providing strategic direction for the company. His business acumen and technological expertise have played key roles in the evolution of NCI’s captioning technology, allowing NCI to support its founding mission amidst an ever-changing world.
Beth Nubbe
Senior VP for Finance, Administration and HR Corporate Secretary to the Board of Trustees
Ms. Nubbe joined NCI as a staff captioner in 1984. She worked in production as Director of Offline Captioning and Audio Description media until 2013. In August 2013, Ms. Nubbe moved over to a role in administration and was elected Secretary to the Board of Trustees. In 2018, she was elected Senior VP for Finance, Administration and HR.
Meredith Patterson
Senior Vice President for Operations and Chief Operating Officer
Ms. Patterson was hired by NCI as an offline caption editor in 2003. That same year, she was tasked with testing and developing NCI’s proprietary speech recognition software, work that laid the foundation for the Voice Writing Department, of which she became supervisor in 2004, Managing Supervisor in 2009, and Director in 2012. In January 2017, she assumed the role of Director of Production and in October 2018 accepted the title of Vice President for Production, making her responsible for managing the growth, development, and efficiency of all production teams at NCI. Ms. Patterson now serves as Senior Vice President for Operations and Chief Operating Officer.
Lydy Pinzon-Dadley
Vice President for Sales and Marketing
Ms. Pinzon-Dadley has been with NCI since 2005 and has been instrumental in expanding NCI’s clientele in order to reach Spanish and Latin American audiences. In addition to the sale and marketing of NCI’s services, she oversees NCI’s business partnerships in Latin America and New York. She has extensive experience fulfilling the captioning, subtitling, and audio description needs of broadcast and cable television networks, educational institutions, public television stations, government entities, and online technology clients.
Darlene Parker
Director of Partnership Development
Ms. Parker joined NCI in 1984 as a member of the real-time captioning staff and was the sixth person in the country to provide real-time captioning for live television. She was promoted to Supervisor and Trainer in 1988 and Director in 2007. She developed real-time training programs and has trained more than 200 real-time captioners. She was instrumental in the development of the Best Practices for Captioning adopted in the FCC February 2014 order and has served on the FCC’s Disability Advisory Committee.
Stephanie Veverka
Director of Production
Ms. Veverka began her NCI career in 2007 as a Voice Writing trainee, the first hired into NCI’s California office. In 2008, her superior voice writing skills and caption quality resulted in her promotion to elevated captioner status, the first of any Voice Writer at NCI. She was promoted to Coordinator in 2008, Supervisor in 2009, Managing Supervisor in 2012, and Director in 2017. Instrumental in growing and managing NCI’s Voice Writing department on the west coast and now countrywide, Ms. Veverka continues to expand the versatility and capabilities of her staff.
Paula McGraw
Director of Technology
Ms. McGraw brought her senior technical management skills to NCI in 2017. She has extensive experience implementing IT strategies, adapting new technologies, and fostering client relationships. Ms. McGraw manages NCI technology initiatives benefitting captioners as well as customers. Her commitment, communication, and competence have made an extraordinary impact on NCI’s technology goals.
Carrie Nicholson
Director of Voice Writing
Ms. Nicholson joined NCI in 2006 as a Voice Writer in training, working out of the Texas office. After some time as a training specialist, she was promoted to the role of Supervisor in 2012, and Managing Supervisor in 2021. As a Supervisor, she’s been involved in interviewing VW candidates, training, and helping ensure smooth day-to-day operations of the Voice Writing department. She became Director of Voice Writing in 2022.
Our Board Members
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CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE NATIONAL CAPTIONING INSTITUTE.
Dr. Chao has been on the NCI Board since 1997 and Chairman and CEO since 1999. Dr. Chao is responsible for guiding the National Captioning Institute’s management team and providing strategic direction for the company. His business acumen and technological expertise have played key roles in the evolution of NCI’s captioning technology, allowing NCI to support its founding mission amidst an ever-changing world.
Dr. Chao received a BSEE degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a MSEE degree from San Jose State College, and a PhD degree from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering.
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Trustee.
Dr. Achintya K. (Achin) Bhowmik is the chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering at Starkey, a privately-held medical devices company with over 5,000 employees and operations in over 100 countries. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s research and development, engineering and program management organizations, and leading the drive to transform hearing aids into multifunctional health and communication devices.
Previously, Dr. Bhowmik was vice president and general manager of Perceptual Computing at Intel, where he was responsible for the R&D, operations, and businesses in the areas of 3D sensing and interactive computing, computer vision and artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and drones, and immersive virtual and mixed reality devices.
Dr. Bhowmik is on the faculty of Stanford University as an adjunct professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, where he advises research and lectures in the areas of sensory augmentation, computational perception, and intelligent systems. He has also held adjunct and guest professor positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Liquid Crystal Institute of the Kent State University, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. He has authored over 200 publications, including two books and over 80 granted patents.
Dr. Bhowmik is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, board of trustees for the National Captioning Institute, board of directors for OpenCV, board of advisors for the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley, industry advisory board for the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He is also on the board of directors and advisors for several technology companies.
His awards and honors include Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), President and Fellow of the Society for Information Display (SID), Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), Artificial Intelligence Excellence award by the Business Intelligence Group, Top 25 Healthcare Technology CTOs by the Healthcare Technology Report, Notable Leaders in Healthcare by Twin Cities Business, Healthcare Heroes award by the Business Journals, Industrial Distinguished Leader award from the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association, TIME’s Best Inventions, and the Red Dot Design award.
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Trustee.
From 1996 to 2015, Susan Hayes served as President & CEO of ReSurge International (formerly Interplast, Inc.). As president, she ushered ReSurge through a strategic evolution from a direct service organization to one that also educates overseas medical professionals and builds permanent surgical capacity in developing countries. That evolution was documented in a Stanford Business School case study, which is marketed nationally.
Ms. Hayes came to ReSurge with 16 years of management, fundraising and media experience in public broadcasting, including as VP for development and publicity for the five TV/radio stations of Western New/Southern Ontario. Throughout her career, Hayes has served on nonprofit boards, including six years serving for Reading Partners, the fastest-growing literacy organization in the U.S., where she served as board chair in 2015-2016.
Ms. Hayes holds BA and MA degrees from the University of South Carolina in government & international studies, an MA in political science from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and completed PhD coursework in political science at the Maxwell School. She is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School Business Executive Program for Nonprofit Leaders.
Hayes was actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa from 1973 to 1990. Raised in a segregated South, Hayes has actively pursued a lifelong commitment to eliminating racism and promoting women’s rights, and for 40 years has devoted personal time to the causes of Vietnam veterans.
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Trustee.
Mr. Morea is a Client Services Executive for Cisco Systems Inc., a worldwide technical leader that designs, manufactures, and sells Internet protocol (IP) based networking and other products related to the communications and information technology industries.
Currently at Cisco, Mr. Morea leads a team that focuses on Services Sales in the Cable/Multiple System Operator (“MSO”) segment. From 2005 until recently, Mr. Morea was a Sales Director at Nokia, Murray Hill, New Jersey, a company that provides networking and communications technology, products, and services to service providers, enterprises, and governments worldwide.
At Nokia, Mr. Morea successfully led the company into MSOs with Services Sales supporting projects such as Cell Site Backhaul, Wi-Fi Planning, Multi-Vendor Support, Design and Deployment Services, as well as Network Operations outsourcing.
Previously, Mr. Morea was Vice President of the Northeast for Tech Mahindra, a global system integrator and business transformation consulting organization focused on the communications industry.
Mr. Morea has also held executive positions at Ericsson, (Former Telcordia Technologies), a leading global provider of telecommunications network software, and services for IP, wireline, wireless and cable; and Verizon, New York, New York, a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services.
Additionally, Mr. Morea was previously on the Board of Directors for Alteva, a Unified Communications Provider and Independent Local Exchange Company.
Mr. Morea holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from State University of New York Maritime College and a Masters in Business Administration degree in Finance from Fordham University.
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Trustee.
Drake Smith was a former Chief Technology Officer for the National Captioning Institute and oversaw all key service improvements including the development of speech recognition-based captioning, a web-based scheduling and resource allocation system, and the delivery of services by data networks rather than phone lines to improve reliability.
Mr. Smith’s relationship with NCI spans more than 30 years, beginning with his development of the world’s first single-chip closed caption decoder while at ITT Semiconductors.
Before joining NCI, he helped promote the use of closed captioning technology overseas, and he represented NCI on the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) working group that created the captioning standard for digital TV. Mr. Smith continues to serve NCI as a member of its Board of Trustees.
Prior to NCI, Mr. Smith founded ULTECH LLC that manufactured broadcast video equipment including closed caption data encoders. He oversaw the bidding and management for custom projects including the design and installation of video data systems for NASA that remotely controlled video cameras for the Space Shuttle program.
Mr. Smith received a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Technology from the University of Lowell and a Masters degree in Software Engineering from Brandeis University.
Careers
COME JOIN OUR TEAM
Current Job Openings
A career at NCI means working with the world’s most advanced captioning systems and the best-trained captioning professionals in the prerecorded, live television, and home video industries.
NCI is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing a work environment that is free from all forms of discrimination in the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, citizenship status, sex, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, pregnancy, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
The National Captioning Institute is currently not recruiting for any positions. Please check back at a later date.
The above list of open positions reflects the current needs of NCI and changes often. As a position is filled or is open, the list will be modified. If you have questions or want to contact the Human Resources Department, click here.
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