In the spirit of the late Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor who dreamed big and persevered to become a Walt Disney Imagineer, the first annual prize in his honor will be given to the president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studio.
Ed Catmull will accept the first Randy Pausch Prize from the Entertainment Technology Center on Sept. 26th and present a lecture in the McConomy Auditorium, the place where Pausch offered his famous “last lecture” to friends and colleagues. He died last July at the age of 47. The Pausch Prize will honor entertainment industry experts who embody Pausch’s spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Carnegie Mellon is also planning a memorial service for Pausch next month. Details will be announced later in the week.
“In years to come, the ETC will seek to honor those individuals whose technical and creative expertise empowers writers, artists, designers, digital media professionals, and even the average citizen to realize dreams, visions, and imaginings beyond the confines of what is possible today,” says Don Marinelli who co-founded the ETC with Pausch. “He helped us make the ETC a place where right-brained and left-brained individuals can work together successfully.”
A four-time Academy Award winner, Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar and created two leading centers of computer graphics research, the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology and the computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd. He is also one of the architects of a highly touted rendering software, RenderMan, which has been used in 44 of the last 47 films nominated for an Academy Award in the Visual Effects category.
Catmull’s lecture will also also serve as a keynote address for the 7th Annual International Conference on Entertainment Computing at Carnegie Mellon, one of the largest and most prestigious conferences for entertainment computing in the world from Sept. 25-27.
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Don Marinelli, Bryon Spice, Carnegie Mellon University
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