Carl Jensema grew up in a small (pop. 3,500) town in Wisconsin. He was left profoundly deafened by a bout with meningitis when he was nine years old. After graduating from high school in 1962, Dr. Jensema continued his education, receiving a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin, a M.A. degree from Claremont Graduate School, and a Ph.D. in Psychometrics and Multivariate Statistics from the University of Washington in 1972. He also spent a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.
Dr. Jensema worked as a researcher and professor at Gallaudet University for 10 years, and as Vice President of the Institute for Disabilities Research and Training (IDRT) for 15 years. His research work centered on the demographics of hearing loss and technology related to communication for the deaf. He has been particularly interested in research on television captioning for many years.
In 1979 the U.S. Department of Education established the National Captioning Institute (NCI) to produce television captioning for the newly developed closed captioning system. Dr. Jensema became NCI's Director of Research, a post he held for seven years. Many years later, on March 14, 2005, Dr. Jensema was formally recognized by the Accessible Media Industry Coalition (AMIC) as a "Pioneer in the Effort to Introduce Closed Captioning and Improve the Lives of all Americans."
Dr. Jensema retired in 2006 and now lives with his wife, Lisa, in Tucson, Arizona. He remains active in the Deaf community and continues to work towards improving captioning services for the deaf.