Bruce Allen (physicist)

Bruce Allen (born May 11, 1959) is an American physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany, and founder and leader of the distributed volunteer computing project Einstein@Home project. He is a honorary physics professor at Leibniz University Hannover, an adjunct physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and also the initiator / project leader of smartmontools hard disk utility.

He has done research work on models of the very early universe (inflationary cosmology, cosmic strings), the detection and data analysis of gravitational waves, and has expertise in the development and operation of large computer clusters. Allen currently leads a research group working on the detection of gravitational waves in data from ground-based interferometric detectors and from pulsar timing arrays, and on radio, gamma-ray and gravitational-wave signals from rotating neutron stars. Allen was one of the first scientists to become aware of the initial detection of GW150914 at LIGO, in September 2015. Allen's research work has been supported by the US National Science Foundation between 1987 and 2018.