Bruce Allen is a theoretical physicist with a background in General Relativity. He is currently working on one of the outstanding experimental and theoretical problems of our time--the detection of gravitational waves. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Relativity Group is one of the charter members of the LIGO-I Scientific Collaboration, and is taking part in the development and testing of data analysis algorithms for use with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), a $300 million NSF-funded project which will become operational around the year 2000. This detector will eventually be able to "see" exotic objects such as orbiting pairs of black holes by detecting the gravitational waves that they emit. As part of this work, Allen and his collaborators are analyzing data from a small-scale prototype detector, located at the California Institute of Technology.

Allen is an expert on the physics of the early universe, and has done extensive work to compare observations of the microwave background radiation with the predictions of cosmic-string and inflationary models. Some of this work has been done with the aid of extensive computer simulations run on supercomputer-class machines. Allen also works on the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime (particularly in the deSitter geometry that describes an inflationary universe) and on the quantum-theoretic properties of linearized gravity.

As an undergraduate at MIT, Allen was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He went to Cambridge as a Marshall scholar, where he received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He received the first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation's competition in 1990, and a Graduate School research award in 1997.

Bruce Allen recently won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation's competition, for work on the time-delay between the two images of quasar whose light is bent by the gravitational field of an intervening galaxy. This time delay can be measured (in the case of 0957+561 it is 420 days), and from the measured delay one might be able to limit the strength of gravitational waves travelling through the universe. Allen's main interest is in the processes that take place in the early history of the universe. In a collaborative project, he has constructed a numerical simulation of the behavior of a network of cosmic strings. The code and its results are being used to derive observational predictions that could decide whether the early universe was dominated by such strings. Allen also works on the theory of quantum fields in curved spacetime (particularly in the deSitter geometry that describes an inflationary universe) and on the quantum-theoretic properties of linearized gravity.