Dr Allen is an Associate Professor and Educational and Developmental Psychologist at Monash University, and an Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Wellbeing Science, University of Melbourne. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Educational and Developmental Psychologist and founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Belonging and Human Connection. As a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society, she serves as Treasurer of the Positive Psychology Interest group.

Dr 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. In a world of rising rates of loneliness and social isolation, a comprehensive understanding of belonging has never been more important.

Dr. Allen has been recognised by The Australian as one of Australia's top researchers and ranked by their independent data-science partner, The League of Scholars as Best In Field  (2022). On an international level, she is a frequently cited author in the field of school belonging (e.g., Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus) and was listed in Elsevier’s top 2% of scientists' annual world-wide analyses for 2021. Dr. Allen has consistently contributed to influential work on student belonging. She has also been recognised by the Journal of University Learning and Teaching Practice for “most influential paper of 2021” (co-authored with Trice, Baumeister & Crawford) and holds the most-cited, paper on school belonging published in the last five years – a work that identifies core factors for fostering school belonging (co-authored with Kern, Waters, Vella-Brodrick & Hattie). Her monograph, The Psychology of Belonging (Routledge, 2020) has been translated into Serbian, Indonesian, and Arabic.Her book, The Psychology of Belonging (Routledge, 2020) has been translated into Serbian, Indonesian, and Arabic and won the 2022 Gold Award in the Nonfiction Book Authors’ Association Awards. 

Dr. 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. In 2022, Dr 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.

Dr Allen’s core work is in direct response to the widely reported global decline in belonging, particularly for students. Her research traces the further deterioration of belonging following COVID-19, and its strong associations with mental illness (both in adolescence and adulthood), wellbeing and academic outcomes, demonstrating that student belonging is an important problem to address. With the study of belonging core to Dr. Allen’s research priorities, her projects have built a conceptual and empirical understanding of what it means to belong. Continued work in this space is both critical and timely.  

More broadly, Dr Allen holds research interests in the areas of working with schools and wellbeing. She has expertise in statistical synthesis.

Dr Allen is the Chief Examiner and Unit Co-Ordinator of  EDF4599 - Positive psychology in professional practice within the Graduate Diploma of Professional Psychology. Dr Allen supervises graduate research students in the Master of Educational and Developmental Psychology. 

Dr Allen is available for consultantion, belonging assessment, and contract research in the areas of belonging and wellbeing.