Allender went to High School in
Mount Pleasant, Iowa. He graduated from the
University of Iowa in 1979 with a double major in Computer Science and Theater. He then graduated from the
Georgia Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1985. After graduation, he became a professor at
Rutgers University, where he stayed for the remainder of his career. Allender’s research focuses on computational complexity theory, including circuit complexity, structural complexity, and the computational limits of low-level complexity classes. He is the brother of
Fred Truck. ==References==