Celebrating MIT's graduate student parents
Happy National Student Parent Month! This month, the Office of Graduate Education is featuring one graduate student parent per week, highlighting their academic work and parenting journey at MIT. Stay tuned for more student parent features!
Family: son Ofek (11), spouse Benny Zhitomirsky, and daughter Ori (9)
Degree program: PhD in Materials Science and Engineering
Years at MIT: started in fall of 2020; graduating in September 2025!
Tamar Kadosh Zhitomirsky is a 5th year PhD student in the Materials Science and Engineering program. Her research focuses on solar technology and sustainability.
Starting at MIT
In 2019, Tamar and her family left their home country of Israel and moved to Cambridge for Tamar to begin work as a scholar at the Tuller Lab at MIT. At the time, her children were 2.5 and 4.5 years old. A year and a half later, in 2020, she started her PhD program and in 2022 she joined the ONE Lab (Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory). Tamar describes her research as “a novel, safe, cost efficient, scalable and manufacturable technique to fabricate perovskite solar cells.”
Support for student families
Before arriving at MIT, Tamar did not know about the many supports for families offered by the Institute. She was pleasantly surprised to learn about the Grant for Graduate Students with Children, which she says provided great relief to her family as they adjusted to life with both parents in school, as her spouse Benny worked as a post doc at the Broad Institute.
A well-rounded grad student experience
During her five years in the PhD program, Tamar made sure to take advantage of all the Institute has to offer. She participated in the GradEL program, where she took leadership courses, began tutoring students, and completed a communications certificate in public speaking for a non-science audience.
Additionally, Tamar took on a leadership role organizing programming for grad student families. Two years into her PhD program, Tamar learned of funding opportunities for building graduate community. She wanted to be involved while also spending time with her children, and developed programming for other student parent families to do just that.
Her programming was very successful, bringing a group of families together every other weekend to participate in local field trips. Some favorites included going to Boston Common to ride swan boats, berry picking, a beach day at Breakheart Reservation, a day trip to Great Wolf Lodge, and a session with a comic artist who worked on a large drawing with all of the kids.
Tamar says her kids loved going on these adventures, meeting other kids of MIT student parents, and visiting her in her campus office. As they prepare to move back to Israel, Tamar shares that her family will miss Cambridge and the community they have built here.
For more information on MIT’s support for students with children, please visit the MIT Families website or contact gradfamilies@mit.edu.
