ABC-TV Airs Special on Former U.Va. Professor Randy Pausch

ABC-TV Airs Special on Former U.Va. Professor Randy Pausch
April 8, 2008 — ABC-TV will air a one-hour special about Professor Randy Pausch this Wednesday April 9. at 10 p.m. The program will be hosted by Diane Sawyer.

Pausch, former professor in the University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science from 1988-1997, was diagnosed last August with pancreatic cancer and given months to live. The special is based on the lecture that Pausch gave at Carnegie Mellon, where he taught since leaving U.Va. That lecture, given in September as part of CMU's last lecture series, was titled "Live Your Childhood Dreams" and has been called "the lecture of a lifetime" by the Wall Street Journal.

A new book, The Last Lecture, written by Pausch with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, has been published by Disney/Hyperion and expands on the famous lecture.

Pausch, 47, is married with children ages 2, 4, and 6. He returned to U.Va. last November and delivered a lecture on time management to a standing-room only audience in Old Cabell Hall. The video of that U.Va. lecture has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the Web.