Watch Video

Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. In addition, he is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles and until recently, was the director of the Alice (www.alice.org) software project.

In August 2006, Pausch was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. He pursued a very aggressive cancer treatment that included major surgery and experimental chemotherapy; however, in August 2007, he was told the cancer had metastasized to his liver and spleen, which meant it was terminal. He then started palliative chemotherapy, intended to extend his life as long as possible.

He achieved worldwide fame for his "The Last Lecture" speech on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University. His "Last Lecture" was entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," and was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures at the university where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical "final talk."

The eClips team was deeply moved by Pausch's message and felt it would be appropriate to "eClip" the content of his talk into 2-4 minute segments so that educators would be able to incorporate pieces of it into their classroom presentations. In keeping with the video's creative ocmmons license, we are making it available for non-commercial purposes.

Randy Pausch received his bachelors in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.