Allen is a Computer Engineering Ph.D. student in the CRSS research group at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the lab as an undergraduate and started his Ph.D. program in 2019. His research interests include systems and security with a particular interest in operating systems and scheduling.

He is currently working on a memory allocator for systems with heterogenous compute and memory resources. Allen also works on Twizzler, an operating system for far-out memories, with Daniel Bittman under Peter Alvaro. Allen is advised by Pankaj Mehra.