Kelly-Ann Allen is an Associate Professor (Research), Educational and Developmental Psychologist, and DECRA Fellow at Monash University, as well as an Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Wellbeing Science, University of Melbourne, and Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Educational and Developmental Psychologist and an editorial board member for Educational Psychology Review.

Allen’s mission is to signal and accentuate the importance of belonging in day-to-day life, and to better understand the mechanics of how it can be enhanced across the lifespan, but particularly in educational and organisational contexts. Her work is based on the need to belong as a powerful driver of motivation and a fundamental pillar of good physical and mental health. With the study of belonging core to Dr. Allen’s research priorities, her publications and projects have built a conceptual and empirical understanding of what it means to belong. In a world of rising rates of loneliness and social isolation, a comprehensive understanding of belonging has never been more important.

Allen has been recognised by The Australian as one of Australia's top 250 researchers and ranked by their independent data-science partner, The League of Scholars as Best In Field  (2022) in belonging/school belonging and as one of the Australian Research TOP 40 Rising Stars in 2020-2022. In 2024 she was awarded a Young Tall Poppy Award  by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science and The Media Award for Public Engagement by the Australian Psychological Society recognising Allen's excellence in both her scientific work and efforts to engage the public.

On an international level, Allen has been recognised as a Top Peer Reviewer by Web of Science, Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS (Prior 5 Year; top 0.05% globally), and listed in the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) top 2% of researchers' annual worldwide analyses for the years 2020 to 2023 (Baas et al., 2021; Ioannidis, 2022, 2023, 2024). Allen has published over 200 scholarly works, with a FWCI of 5.91 (student engagement) and including the ESI Highly Cited Paper (1%) What Schools Need to Know About School Belonging co-authored with Kern, Waters, Vella-Brodrick & Hattie. Her publications have received >10,000 citations with an h-index of 45 (Google Scholar).

Her monograph, The Psychology of Belonging (Routledge, 2020) has been translated into Serbian, Indonesian, Mandarin, and Arabic, and won the 2022 Gold Award in the Nonfiction Book Authors’ Association Awards. She led the Building Better Schools with Evidence-based Policy research-to-policy project (Allen, Reupert, & Oades, 2021), which involved 70+ scholars and 38 policies. It was recognised as the #1 open-access publication of 2021 by Taylor and Francis and awarded the Dean’s Award for Research Enterprise. Policies within the project have been adopted in educational districts across Australia, the UK, the US, and 30 other countries (Altmetric 413).

Allen has successfully delivered several research projects (> $3M) and has recently been awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA fellowship (DE25) (value $426,618) for An Urgent Need for School Belonging: Meta-Analyses & Participatory Action. Notably, she led the Victorian arm of the Category 1 Thriving Kids and Parents Schools Project, with CIs Boyle & Sanders, which received $1.12 million and reached 21,000 parents across 300 schools to enhance school-parent collaboration. Allen co-led the High Impact Wellbeing Strategies project with Grové, now available to 648,044 students across 1,553 Victorian schools. She also led, in collaboration with AERO, the creation of a new belonging measure for children aged 3 to 8. Her international projects include working with Brown University's Annenberg Institute to develop an open-source library of school belonging measures and accompanying white paper, Facebook to investigate internet addiction on adolescent mental health as well as other initiatives aimed at improving school belonging in schools, both nationally and globally. 

Allen values global networks and partnerships, recognising that these are essential to ensuring that research is translated in a way that is practical, usable, and socially beneficial. In 2018, she founded, and now co-directs, the Global Belonging Collaborative, a large transdisciplinary team dedicated to developing the field of belonging through the dissemination of research, engagement in translational projects, and the pooling of international expertise. Among other things, the collaborative includes a publicly accessible belonging metric repository. Allen is a part of the research team contributing to Harvard Univerisity's Global Flourishing Study (GFS), focusing specifically on the theme of belonging within the broader framework of the 5-year longitudinal investigation across 22 countries and 240,000 participants. In 2022, Allen joined the M&M'S FUNd Advisory Council, alongside other belonging, diversity, and inclusion advocates and experts, to assist the iconic brand in achieving their innovative vision of increasing a sense of belonging for 10 million people around the world by 2025.

Allen's research regularly features in media articles and podcasts. She worked with the Department of Education Queensland for Bullying No Way week, producing a podcast for the National Week of Action with the theme "everyone belongs." Allen has delivered over 70 invited presentations and keynotes, including to 5,000 educators at the Be You (Beyond Blue) conference, the Happiness & It's Causes Conference, and NASA’s National Space Council Users' Advisory Group for STEM Education, Diversity & Inclusion. She has collaborated with the American Psychological Society (APA) on a self-care resource for psychologists and a briefing for U.S. senators on technology, education, and social connection. Her work has informed national policy documents and community initiatives, including Alberta Municipalities in Canada, shaping belonging frameworks for populations of 10,000 to 65,000.

Allen writes for Psychology Today and PsychWire on the science of belonging.