The Community-Engaged Practice and Innovation Awards recognize faculty who have developed community-engaged learning, leadership or research activities that create curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students.
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Dave Lin received the Community-Engaged Practice & Innovation Award for his tireless devotion to graduate education and for providing opportunities for graduate students to find meaningful connections to life outside of academia. Spurred by student interest in 2013, Lin started Fall into Science, an outreach program connecting graduate students in biomedical and biological sciences (BBS) with K-12 students.

The popularity of the program has increased each year. To date, more than 150 BBS graduate students have participated in the program, making STEM-related presentations to more than 1,800 students in Ithaca-area schools.

In 2020, Lin expanded the Fall into Science program to meet an outreach requirement of a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant project on  infertility. Involving students from disciplines beyond BBS, the innovative addition to the program focuses on reproductive biology for middle-school audiences, including topics such as sexual and asexual reproduction, genetics and evolution.