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Bruce Allen

  • Adjunct Professor, Physics

Biographical Sketch

Bruce Allen earned his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT in 1980, completing an experimental thesis on the cosmic microwave background under the supervision of Rainer Weiss. He then pursued a PhD at Cambridge University, where he was supervised by Stephen Hawking. His doctoral thesis was entitled “Vacuum Energy in General Relativity” and the PhD was formally awarded in January 1984.

From 1983 to 1985, Allen was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the supervision of Jim Hartle and Gary Horowitz. He then held a postdoctoral appointment at Tufts University from 1985 to 1986, supervised by Alex Vilenkin and Larry Ford. From 1986 to 1987, he held positions at the Observatoire de Paris–Meudon, supervised by Brandon Carter and Thibault Damour, and at the École Normale Supérieure, supervised by John Iliopoulos. He returned to Tufts University as a Research Assistant Professor from 1987 to 1989.

Allen was recruited to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee by Leonard Parker and John Friedman, joining the Physics Department in 1989 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 and to Full Professor in 1997. At that time, his research focused on curved-space quantum field theory and on early-universe cosmology, particularly inflation and cosmic string models. Encouraged in part by Rainer Weiss, Allen became interested in gravitational waves (GW) as a potential tool for probing the conditions of the very early universe.

In 1995, as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project began construction, Allen decided to become involved and established a LIGO research group at UWM. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the group expanded to include three additional faculty members—Patrick Brady, Jolien Creighton, and Alan Wiseman—and developed into the leading data analysis group within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

In late 2006, Allen moved to Germany to serve as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, while continuing his affiliation as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also holds the title of Honorary Professor of Physics at Leibniz University Hannover. Allen takes particular pride in the fact that the first person to directly identify a gravitational-wave signal (GW150914) was Marco Drago, a postdoctoral researcher from his group in Hannover.

Allen’s research has covered a wide range of topics, but since the mid-1990s it has primarily focused on gravitational waves and the detection of weak electromagnetic signals buried in noise. He directs the Einstein@Home project, which harnesses idle computing power donated by roughly half a million volunteers worldwide to conduct searches where sensitivity is limited by computational resources. Beyond its strong public outreach component—enabling non-scientists to participate directly in cutting-edge research—Einstein@Home carries out the most sensitive searches for continuous gravitational waves, led by his colleague and wife, Maria Alessandra Papa. The project also searches for faint signals from radio and gamma-ray pulsars, having discovered more than fifty such pulsars in data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Allen's current research interests are pulsar timing arrays, lattice quantizers, and the detection of new extreme radio and gamma-ray pulsars.

Prizes and Awards:

Selected Publications

A fairly complete list of Allen's publications may be found:

UWM Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.   |   To learn more, visit the Electa Quinney Institute website.