Wayside Native Sean Moran Earns Summer Research Award

EASTON, MA (04/10/2012)(readMedia)-- Wayside native Sean Moran will be one of 50 students from Stonehill College working with faculty members at the College this summer on research projects through the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. The SURE Program provides students with an opportunity to perform significant, publishable research under the guidance of an experienced faculty researcher.

Moran, a junior economics major at Stonehill, will work with Sean Mulholland, assistant professor of Economics on How Hate Became a Crime: An Empirical Investigation of State Hate Crime Legislation.

Moran will be working with Professor Mulholland to empirically test the hypothesis that variations in state hate crime laws reflect the legal and social definitions of what is a hate crime and that these differences in policy are shaped by politics and social influence. They will do this by determining whether passage of state hate crime legislation is associated with the fraction of their citizens who are members of civil rights and victim rights organizations. The resulting co-authored manuscript will be presented at the 2013 Eastern Economic Association meeting or the 2013 Midwest Economics Association meeting.

The scholars and their faculty mentors are the 17th group to work under the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. SURE Scholars will engage in weekly meetings to discuss the progress of their projects and other topics of general interest, and will be paid a stipend for their full-time service. All SURE Scholars will present summaries of their summer's work at an all-campus poster session in the early fall.

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