She is an internationally recognized expert on bacterial wilt[2] and has received several awards for her work.
[2] She studied from 1975 to 1978 at Swarthmore College and then worked on a farm growing organic vegetables, but the venture was unprofitable.
In 1987 she graduated with a Ph.D. in plant pathology from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
[4] As a postdoc, Allen was from 1986 to 1988 a research associate in Lyon at the CNRS Laboratoire de génétique moléculaire microbienne.
)[3] From 1988 to 1992 she held a postdoc position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), where she began research on bacterial wilt.