Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Allen received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1991. He worked at Honda of America Manufacturing and Honda R&D North America before returning to Ohio State for graduate study in the Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics Laboratories where he received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. His graduate research involved the effect of plasmas on shockwaves, combustion modeling, and resonant vibrational excitation of nitric oxide via a CO laser. He joined the mechanical engineering faculty of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2006 and is currently an Associate Professor. While at Rose-Hulman he has collaborated extensively with Rebecca DeVasher (Department of Chemistry) on combustion research, funded through a Lilly Foundation Faculty Success Grant, involving many undergraduate students. He is a Visiting Scientist in the Hieftje Lab during the 2013-14 academic year working on distance of flight mass spectrometry, flow visualization, and plasma related research.
