Lattice studies of baryons

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, and describe how such calculations provide insight into the structure of the hadrons. Finally, I discuss direct probes of the quark and gluon structure of baryons through the lattice measurement of the moments of quark distributions and of Generalized Parton Distributions