In 1987 Allen became a research assistant professor at Tufts University. He joined the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1989 as assistant professor of physics, was promoted to associate professor of physics in 1992 and to a full professor of physics in 1997. In 2007 he became a director at the
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in
Hanover, Germany and an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Since 2008 he is also an honorary professor of physics at
Leibniz University Hannover. Allen has worked on early universe cosmology, inflationary models of the early universe, properties of de Sitter space, and curved-space quantum field theory. and the gravitational radiation emitted by them. He made contributions to the detection and data analysis of gravitational waves of different types: from a stochastic background, from inspiraling compact binaries, and continuous, near-sinusoidal signals. Allen was a member of the executive committee of the
LIGO Scientific Collaboration from 1997 to 2018. and on using the
Einstein@Home project to discover new radio and gamma-ray
pulsars in data from large
radio telescopes and the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. He has also worked data analysis for
pulsar timing arrays. This includes research on the variance of the
Hellings-Downs correlation, which is a central measure for the detection of gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays. Between 1987 and 2018, Bruce Allen's research has been supported by the
US National Science Foundation through 14 grants totaling approximately $10 million. == Awards ==