Theresa Wrangham has been the National Vaccine Information Center's (NVIC) Executive Director since 2010. She brings to NVIC over 25 years of business administration experience, 10 of which were spent in non-profit organizations. Theresa's skills in project management, accounting, and risk assessment have greatly complimented her role with NVIC. Her current duties and responsibilities include coordination of NVIC's volunteer and counseling programs, website design and content management, drafting and implementation of organizational policy, monitoring of federal advisory committee activities related to vaccine policy-making, and audit and budget preparation. Theresa is also a consumer reviewer for systematic reviews and their protocols that are undertaken by the Cochrane Collaboration via NVIC's membership with the Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE).
She became a parent advocate as a result of her daughter Deanna’s life-threatening asthma, as well as her daughter Rachel’s diagnosis of an Autism Spectrum Disorder. As a former AMTA massage therapist and Usui Reiki master, she views health holistically and brings an experienced parent's perspective on raising a healthy children affected by asthma and ASD to her advocacy work. She lives in Colorado with her husband of over 20 years, Scott.
In 2001 she co-founded the Autism Society of Boulder County (ASBC) in Colorado and served five terms as its president and, served on the Board of Directors for the Autism Society of Colorado. She served on the Board of Directors for SafeMinds from 2007 to 2010 and is its immediate past president. Theresa also serves on advisory boards for the US Autism & Asperger Association and the American Medical Autism Board and is a former representative on the Boulder Valley School District Special Education Advisory Committee.
Within her community, she has helped to raise public awareness of biomedical causes and treatments for autism, co-authored the publishing Colorado’s first autism specific resource guide and coordinated an annual conference and monthly lectures, as well as spearheaded Colorado’s consensus statement supporting the Combating Autism Act. Additionally, in 2005 she worked with her local disability services agency, Imagine!, to establish a parent-directed treatment program for individuals with autism who are ineligible for state DDS services. This program has paid for over $575,000 in treatments and changed the lives of over 150 families. She also spearheaded Colorado's legislative efforts to ban mercury-containing vaccines. Theresa was invited to collaborate with Google to create Project Spectrum, a program designed to assist the autism community to identify possible career paths and to give educators classroom tools, and assist parents to obtaining special education services for their children. In 2006, the Boulder County Business Report recognized Theresa as a Health Care Hero.
Theresa wrote and regularly published the ASBC and SafeMinds eNewsletters and, articles in Mothering Magazine, The Autism File, Age of Autism and Pathways and currently writes articles for NVIC's eNewsletter. She has been featured in local and national television and print news reports. She is a regular lecturer at autism conferences and support groups. She also participates regularly in federal advisory public engagement and comments, as well as has participated in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s H1N1 Stakeholder Meeting and Denver Meningococcal Public Engagement.