communicating your research at conferences both improve your presentation skills.Discussion and engagement with your research: Lecturing is an additional forum for the discussion of your research activities. A students question or research project input, may provide you with a new research direction.Institutions are beginning to acknowledge teaching quality: Whilst it may not form a formal part of assessment, there is a growing emphasis on the contribution of teaching to career promotion. In the UK this will be formalised with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework, (TEF), in the coming year.Organisation: Preparing lectures involves a good level of organisation and time management, both of which could benefit your research. Case Study: Dr Hannah K Batchelor - Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham, UKDr Hannah Batchelor has over 16 years research experience and has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers. She has an active interest in formulating medicines for children and has presented a TEDx talk and curates a blog: Making medicines child-sized, on the topic.Dr Batchelors successive academic positions as Lecturer, Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer, have all involved teaching. Here, she provides her honest insights and experience of striking a balance between her research and lecturing responsibility.What has been your experience of teaching and lecturing to date?Dr. Batchelor: Generally, I enjoy teaching, but I admit that the lectures I find pleasure in the most, are those most closely linked to my research. For example in my current role, I find teaching Pharmacokinetics really interesting, but Pharmaceutical Packaging positively dull. One thing that we shouldnt lose sight of is the importance of teaching for institutional funding. If you do a direct comparison between how much funding is generated by research grants versus educating a large number of students, the latter pays a lot of the bills. In my experience, whilst there are some academic posts available that are research only, they tend to be on short fixed-term contracts like post-doctoral positions. These can present a challenge if you want a mortgage, have to balance your work life with a family, or if you take maternity or paternity leave. Most permanent academic positions in the UK involve teaching commitments.Did you ever feel like there was a conflict between teaching responsibilities with your research?Dr. Batchelor: Yes - all the time! I guess as stated before, teaching accounts for a lot of university funding but you get promoted based on your research. However, I think this might change in the future with the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework in the UK. It will help considerably, as Universities will be rated on the standard of their teaching, as well as their research. Previously, the criteria were unclear and often it was the hours taught that were considered most important, rather than the quality.Talking about current issues in medication to students, can often result in interesting questions that merit further research.How do you balance your teaching and research role?Dr. Batchelor: It took 5 years of hands-on experience to get the balance right. In this time, I learnt its important to allocate a set amount of time to prepare