The late Randy Pausch's legacy continues to grow.

Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, will receive the first Randy Pausch Prize, established by Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center to honor people in the entertainment industry whose work embodies the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration that Pausch championed. That is the vision out of which the center was created.

Catmull will also present the keynote speech at the seventh International Conference on Entertainment Computing, a three-day conference hosted by the ETC this year. Catmull will speak today at 9:15 a.m. from the same spot where Pausch delivered his famous "last lecture" -- in Carnegie Mellon University Center's McConomy Auditorium.

Pausch is the Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who died July 25 of pancreatic cancer. The message of Pausch's "last lecture" last fall has inspired millions through the best-selling book "The Last Lecture" and through views on the Internet.

Pixar's Catmull was the logical choice as the Pausch award's first recipient, says ETC co-founder and executive producer Don Marinelli. The ETC's goal is to "facilitate communication between the artist and technologist to make each of their jobs easier, and to provide more opportunities for creative expression through technological advancement. Pixar is the epitome of all of that."

Catmull says receiving the Pausch award is especially meaningful for him, because he knew Pausch personally and was familiar with his work. Pausch's legacy through his "last lecture" is well known, but Catmull says his role in founding the ETC and creating the vision for it is an equally important part of that legacy.

At ETC, students majoring in both technical and creative fields collaborate on a variety of new media projects, including virtual reality and avatar creation, computer and online games, robot animatronics, technology for theme parks and more.

When Catmull was a kid, the movies that sparked his imagination were animated classics like "Pinocchio" and "Peter Pan." Although he went on to a career in computer science, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, his love of animation stuck with him. He worked with Lucasfilm, Ltd. before founding Pixar, the studio behind a string of animated blockbusters, such as "Toy Story," "Wall-E," "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles."

He's also one of the architects of RenderMan, software used by digital effects and computer graphics designers in creating movie special effects for more than a decade. His technical work in film has won four Academy Awards.

And Catmull played a role in the early days of the ETC, offering Pausch and Marinelli advice on how to prepare students to work in the rapidly changing world of entertainment media, how to put together a creative organization that mixes techies and artists.

One of Catmull's suggestions was to have everyone in the program study improvisational acting. Improv is an art, but it can also be a valuable tool for teaching people how to work together, Catmull says. "People learn quickly that you can stop a conversation or you can do things to keep it going. Having improv classes is beneficial culturally to a group."

Twelve years later, the Pixar/Disney-ETC connection is still strong. Several Carnegie Mellon grads have gone on to work there. Off-site, Disney also is funding a CMU research laboratory where animation, robotics and other technologies will be developed for Disney's film, resort and entertainment empire.

"You want university programs where the best students are working together in a variety of fields," Catmull says. "The ETC completely embraces that. There's something about having world-class smart people both in technology and the arts coming together, solving problems and doing things you wouldn't have thought of otherwise."

But Catmull doesn't believe in the left brain vs. right brain dichotomy. "There's a common assumption that somehow technology and art are very different from one another. ... I would say that they are actually doing the same thing. The creative impulse is the same impulse."

For someone who lives and works on the cutting edge of new animation media, Catmull doesn't like to crystal-gaze. What really matters, he says, is putting together the community that works well and tries to solve problems -- like the one Pausch envisioned and established.

"Then they take you in directions that you can't foresee."