Living the good life: pursuing excellence as a scientist and as a teacher

Do research and teaching represent competing demands on our time and energy, or have we bought into a false dichotomy? As a scientist, my job is to find truth. As a teacher, my job is to teach the next generation how to find truth. In this talk, I discuss the ways in which research and teaching have been synergistic in my experience, as well as the tension commonly felt among professors (myself included) as to how to ``split our time'' between the two. I will share a brief synopsis of my teaching philosophy, and I hope to give some insight into what (in my opinion) makes or breaks you as a teacher. I will also share some of my experience in this great adventure we call scientific progress.