Ralph and Edna Marwill College Scholarship

According to Congregation Gates of Heaven organizers, Dr. Ralph Marwill was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Dental School and Columbia University. Edna Marwill was a civic and Jewish community leader with a variety of interests. She worked with the City of Schenectady Board of Education, the Schenectady Day Nursery, and the Freedom Forum, an organization which promoted interest in civic and educational topics, brought lecturers to Schenectady, and spread factual information. This scholarship is offered annually to meritorious students of higher education.

Two students will receive a $1,000 scholarship each to their respective colleges and universities from the Marwill College Scholarship Fund. They are Zoe Byrnes and Alise Hale.

Zoe Byrnes will enter her freshman year at the University of Southern California in fall 2026, majoring in global health. Byrnes’s interests include health, social justice, environmental issues, and food insecurity. Her goals include community-based research to investigate the relationships between social and environmental factors on health and wellness, improving community health and informing health policy at local and global scales, and she plans to further her education to earn a doctorate in global health in pursuit of these goals. Byrnes has extensive extra-curricular experience, including interning at Sycamore Collaborative’s free lunch program, serving over 6,500 free lunches to youth in need, acting as a student leader with Elevating Student Voices on the Capital Region Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and as founder and president of The Pantry Project, a club at Niskayuna High School which fights food insecurity and builds community partnerships.

Alise Hale will begin her graduate studies in fall 2026 at Simmons University in Boston, pursuing a master’s of social work degree. Hale graduated from SUNY Geneseo in May 2026 with a degree in psychology, where she worked as a research assistant in the social and emotional development lab. She works as a mental health assistant at Ellis Hospital’s Adolescent Psychiatric Unit and enjoys working with children. She was a volunteer at Golisano Children’s Hospital, a volunteer swim instructor at SUNY Geneseo, and a Special Olympics swim coach. She also coordinated digital content for Girls on the Run Capital Region. Her volunteer experiences and more recent work have motivated her, she reports, to understand the comprehensive nature of educational inequities and structural barriers to learning, through curious, caring practice.