Michael Ullman:  

My Story. Born in Norfolk, VA and went to the Hebrew Academy until 8th grade. When I was five years old, the neighbors next to me (husband, wife, two children) all died in a private plane crash. When i was in first grade, I learned of a child in my school getting leukemia and dying soon thereafter. Those incidents among others influenced me to understand early the frailty of one's own mortality. Later in life, I never understood why teens and young adults had such a feeling of immorality and would easily put themselves in risky situations, when I always saw the grim reaper at every intersection. After Hebrew School ended in 8th grade, I started going to public school at Campostella for 9th grade and Granby High School graduating in 1980. Although my school was 99.4% white, yes one black jewish girl that everyone remembers, I did not have any trepidation about going to public school. My last year in Hebrew Academy was spent mainly goofing around. After Granby High, I then went to University of Virginia and graduated in 1984 with a degree in FInance and Marketing. I stayed around Charlottesville, VA for the next three years since I didn't know what I wanted to do and despite success in HS my grades were not very good in college so i didn't get any job offers from the big firms that came to the school. I ended up working in restaurants since I always liked to cook and my last year I was Chef Administrator at Lake Monticello Country Club. 15 miles east of Charlottesville. I then migrated up to the Washington DC area in 1987 and continued to work in restaurants until I started having significant anxiety issues. Anxiety is too general of a term - but it gets the point across. I started developing agoraphobia which i still battle today. This slowed me down for several years since I had to take it easy. on stress and responsibility. I then decided to go back to school at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in their Sociology program. During school, my anxiety-related problems got worse and some minor heart palpitation problems arose but since I was in school and not working I was able to manage them, sometimes barely. .I graduated with a Masters in 1995 and spent some time in Brazil afterwards with a Brazilian girlfriend at the time. I came back - age 35 and essentially no money saved - and got a job with a research institute at UNC-Chapel Hill and finally started my real career. I worked there for 6 years - the longest job of my life - until I decided 10 years in Chapel Hill was long enough and moved to Hawaii in 2001 with a different girlfriend who was going back home. After moving to Honolulu, I began working at the primary Emergency Homeless Shelter in Honolulu as Director of Programs. I ended up staying in Honolulu for 8 years. I became heavily involved in homeless services and worked or helped numerous agencies. During that time, I met my future wife Dr. Chanida Siripraparat in 2005. She was just finishing her medical residency and fellowship in Psychiatry. She was from Thailand and had come over after medical school. In 2004, I had decided to go back to school and finally finished my Ph.D. which I had started years ago in NC. I continued to work part-time while taking classes. I completed my Doctoral degree in Social Welfare at the University of Hawaii-Manoa in 2009. Shortly thereafter, we moved back to the mainland in 2009 to Baltimore, MD and then got married in 2010. I was 47 and she was 34 at the time. We had a simple DIY wedding in a nice rented house on the Chesapeake Bay outside Baltimore. I catered the food. I continued to work for a national homeless veterans organization remotely for several years and then picked up some work doing program evaluatio...Expand for more