The world's resources are finite and their arrival unpredictable; from gaps in the canopy or phage in microbial mats, from rainfall to reproduction, stochasticity in the resource arrival, migration, birth and death drives and defines ecological systems. Alex's Ph.D. looked at how stochasticity affects the evolutionary outcome of competitive systems ranging from gut bacteria to the S&P 500. Alex is currently at Duke University using CRISPRs to study how viruses mediate competition in bacterial communities.