Ardak Meterkulova '13 and Mangaliso Mohammed '13 have each been selected to receive this year's Davis Projects for Peace, a $10,000 prize to implement programs this summer that they have designed to promote peace.

Each has created projects that address HIV/AIDS prevention in their home countries. Meterkulova will be working in Kazakhstan to "help young students in [the] Almaty region protect themselves from the disease and to be more educated about their sexual health," she wrote in an email to the Justice. Mohammed will work in Nkwalini, Swaziland with orphans living with HIV to create a vegetable garden and free-range chicken farm and to promote healthy eating and traditional methods of food production, according to an email from Peace, Conflict and Coexistence graduate program administrator Cheryl Hansen.

The Davis Projects for Peace is an external program that works with over 90 universities, according to its website. Brandeis has worked with the program for four years and submits two applicants each year, said Hansen in an interview. Though the program typically chooses only one recipient per school, this is the second year that both applicants from the University have been selected, Hansen said.

Meterkulova will work to create a bilingual education film in Kazakh and Russian to raise HIV/AIDS awareness and that will be used, along with exercises and text, in summer camps in the primarily Muslim Almaty region, wrote Hansen in her email.

Meterkulova said in the email that her project proposal was influenced in part by receiving the Presidential Scholarship of Kazakhstan in 2008, which allowed her to study internationally and "entrusted [her] with the responsibility to use the knowledge from [her] education to improve Kazakhstan." As a double major in Business and Health: Science, Society, and Policy, Meterkulova wrote that classes she has taken at Brandeis have taught her about working to create healthy environments in communities that are "raised in conditions of adversity."

"Choosing Brandeis University for my education has also alerted me to the importance of being a world leader by creating peace for a sustainable future," she wrote.

Mohammed, a double major in Economics and Environmental Studies, said in an interview that the Anthropology courses he has taken at Brandeis have helped shape his project and place the concepts he has learned at Brandeis in a larger context.

Mohammed said that the fact that both his and Meterkulova's projects deal with HIV/AIDS prevention is a coincidence and that he looks forward to seeing how the projects begin "dealing with it in totally different ways and in different settings." He has focused his project on promoting healthy eating, he continued, because the medication provided to patients to treat HIV/AIDS is ineffective without food and because he hopes to start with "fundamental" steps to improve conditions for those living with the virus.

"It's about finding ways ... to empower people to overcome whatever stresses they're facing, and if I can help do that, I'll be happy," Mohammed said.

"I expect really good things from both of these students," said Hansen. "They're both just dynamite."

The PAX program will host a reception to honor Mohammed and Meterkulova on Monday, Apr. 22 from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Shapiro Campus Center Art Gallery.