Demographic stochasticity – the population-level randomness that emerges when individual birth, death and interaction events are unpredictable – is a ubiquitous component of any finite sized population. Though there is a pervasive belief that demographic noise simply creates fluctuations around average population trajectories, in many systems this is not the case. Stochasticity can lead to fundamentally novel behaviour. Not only does demographic noise drive extinction events, but it has also been shown to induce spatial patterning, species coexistence, speciation and selection reversal. My research aims to explore how demographic noise influences population models in ecology and biology.