Bruce Allen (born May 11, 1959) is an American physicist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover Germany and leader of the Einstein@Home project for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

He is also a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the initiator / project leader of smartmontools hard disk utility.

[1] He has done research work on models of the very early universe (inflationary cosmology, cosmic strings).

Allen currently leads a research group working on the detection of gravitational waves.

[2] Allen's research work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation since 1987.