Prof. Allen received his PhD from the Australian National University in 1998. Following postdoctoral work at the Australian National University, he moved to the USA in 2001 to work at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University as Revson Fellow and Keck Fellow. He built his own group at the University of California Davis as Assistant Professor from 2004, where he received a National Science Foundation Career Award and continuing National Science Foundation grant. He was given early tenure in 2009 and named University of California Davis Chancellor’s Fellow. In late 2011 he returned to Australia to become Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. His group is supported by the Australian Research Council, The National Health & Medical Research Council, the National Institutes of Health, Medical Advances Without Animals Trust, and supercomputing agencies in Australia and the USA. He specialises in quantitative methods in computational biophysics applied to membrane transport phenomena. His work has led to improved understanding of the movement of charged molecules and peptides through biological membranes, the selective conduction mechanisms of potassium and sodium channels, and has provided insight into the structures and functions of ion channels in the nervous system.