Allen is a Computer Engineering Ph.D. student in the CRSS/SSRC 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 programming model to make it easy to program computers 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 Darrell Long.