Baryon spectroscopy and operator construction in lattice QCD

This talk describes progress at understanding the properties of the nucleon and its excitations from lattice QCD. I begin with a review of recent lattice results for the lowest-lying states of the excited baryon spectrum. The need to approach physical values of the light quark masses is emphasized, enabling the effects of the pion cloud to be revealed. I then outline the development of techniques that will enable the extraction of the masses of the higher resonances. I will describe how such calculations provide insight into the structure of the hadrons, and enable comparison both with experiment, and with QCD-inspired pictures of hadron structure, such as calculations in the limit of large N-c.