He is currently the director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard University's T. H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is also an associate professor.
He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review.
[7] Allen studies the role that buildings play in climate change and strategies to off-set building-related emissions.
Allen created Harvard's 'The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building', a report that synthesized the scientific research on factors that lead to better health indoors.
[13] Allen holds a patent for "Intelligent Building Monitoring" and H.E.A.A.L., which is a system and algorithm for analyzing real-time data from indoor air quality sensors that bins data and scores building health performance into: Health-Optimized, Excellent, Action, Alert, Limit.