She completed her doctoral studies in physics in 1922 at Clark University with Arthur Gordon Webster, with thesis research done at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She also did research at Harvard University before becoming a professor at Mount Holyoke, where she taught for 31 years, until her retirement in 1959.

For nearly 20 years, starting in the early 1960s, Allen collaborated with Erwin Saxl, an industrial physicist living in Harvard, Massachusetts, on experiments with a torsion pendulum.

Allen and Saxl reported anomalous changes in the period of a torsion pendulum during a solar eclipse in 1970 and hypothesized that “gravitational theory needs to be modified”.

[2][3] Their measurements, and similar anomalies earlier observed by Allais using a paraconical pendulum, have not been accepted by the physics community as in need of unconventional explanation, and subsequent experiments have not succeeded in reproducing the results.