Meet Jacquelyn Ingram: Shot@Life Champion, Nurse Practitioner Student…and Jet Ski Health Care Provider
This vaccine access advocate also shares her best hopes for our interconnected world.
Jacquelyn Ingram understands the realities behind providing community care. Growing up in rural Alaska, she knows that the terrain can be inhospitable to providers and patients alike: “It’s such a vast state and people live without roads or separated by severe weather,” she recalls. Ingram also knows that the history of her home state includes hard-won efforts to bring care to its residents. “We have the Iditarod, and that was based on when the dogs had to bring vaccines to a rural place a long time ago in order to eradicate disease.” Ingram now works in Hawaii, a state comprised of islands where residents experience similar challenges when it comes to access to care and immunization accessibility.
Ingram’s understanding of the difficulties patients may face — paired with her career-long commitment to the well-being of children — brought her to the 2026 National Advocacy Summit last month in Washington, D.C. The summit is sponsored by Shot@Life, an organization that, since its founding in 2012, has trained more than 4,000 Americans to become global vaccine equity advocates like Ingram.
Through our longstanding partnership with United Nations – Shot@Life, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners® (AANP) has welcomed the opportunity to designate members to attend the Annual Shot@Life Summit. Nurse practitioners (NPs) and students studying to become NPs who attend Shot@Life’s annual summit gain valuable tools to enhance their advocacy skills and are trained to engage in discussions with legislators about the critical importance of vaccines.
Inspired to Respond
In Hawaii, Ingram met Kari Wheeling, MPH, APRN, FNP-BC, currently the chief clinical officer at Ingram’s employer Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawai’i. In 2023, Wheeling and Ingram were part of a team who volunteered to help those affected by the 2023 Hawaii wildfires. “Kari and I were able to go over [to Lahaina, Maui],” Ingram recalls. “We were jet skied to the beach and helped start up some of the first medical response tents.” Both providers were part of the post-fire recovery efforts and rebuilding for about five and a half months, Ingram says.
She describes their efforts as a foundation that they were able to later build upon. “We were able to open a clinic on Maui. We have clinical opportunities where there was a maternity desert before the tragedy. We continue to see people clinically and for mental health.” Ingram shares that this has been once-in-a-lifetime work. “It’s been a really fun project — just dreaming out how we can do this, have the perfect team and then making it happen.”
Action and Advocacy
Wheeling, an active member of AANP who received AANP’s State Award for Outstanding Contributions for Hawaii last year, introduced Ingram to AANP and to other opportunities presented by AANP’s partners — like United Nations – Shot@Life. In 2026, Shot@Life partnered with United to Beat Malaria, and Ingram joined more than 100 immunization champions from around the country in D.C. for a two-day program to further advocacy on vaccine access and raise awareness on Capitol Hill.
“It was quite a journey to go there,” says Ingram. “I think I was one of the people that traveled the farthest.” This first-time collaboration between Shot@Life and United to Beat Malaria featured speaker Dr. Jerome Adams, MD, MPH, former Surgeon General of the United States. Ingram was particularly inspired by Dr. Adams’ comments for health care providers: “He really opened my eyes toward speaking with expertise and our lived experience, but in that neutral way to really reach people across the spectrum of politics.”
At the conference, Ingram and other attendees had the opportunity to hear from older practitioners who had worked on early vaccines. “We talked about polio and the different conditions that are pretty much eradicated because of things like vaccines and the campaign around [vaccinations],” she says. As part of the Shot@Life Summit, Ingram, members of the Alaska and Hawaii delegation and Shot@Life staff visited the Capitol building to offer information and statistics to members of Congress about the importance of vaccine access.
Local Work, Global Repercussions
When asked how the summit changed her perspective surrounding global health, Ingram explains that her viewpoint as a midwife and NP student was bolstered by being able to speak from her own experiences while hearing from others. “This role of choosing nursing and serving people is about clinical care, but it’s also about education and advocacy. When we’re caring about one child, we’re caring about all children.”
Ingram also enjoyed hearing from health care professionals in other disciplines, including pharmacy and medicine, that are also passionate about the importance of working toward a healthier world. “If we all take a step back, we have a responsibility toward global health because we are all citizens here, and the world is small now. We learned that during COVID. We travel, or other people travel, and that affects us all. It’s not something that’s outta sight, outta mind. And I think it was really exciting to be able to present to people where we are the constituents.”
More Ways to Champion Vaccine Access
Want to learn more about Shot@Life? Read profiles of past Shot@Life Champions like Ivy Bagley, Reenu Varghese and Beth Luthy, and then enroll in the AANP CE Center activity “Shot@Life – Using Your Voice to Protect Global Childhood Immunization Programs” which offers 0.9 contact hours of continuing education credit.