Christian Allen is Professor of Computational Aerodynamics. His research field is the development of computational methods for the solution of the governing fluid flow equations, the generation of computational meshes, and optimisation techniques. Specific research areas include steady and unsteady flow simulation methods, mesh generation and deformation techniques, surface and geometry modelling, optimisation, aerodynamic-structural coupling, volume data manipulation and interpolation and adaptive sampling. Specific applications include aerodynamic and aeroacoustic simulation and optimisation of wings, rotor blades and wind turbines.

Recent efforts have concentrated on `empowering' technology; generic universal pre-, co-, and post-processing methods that make CFD methods more effective, and methods to extract maximum information from CFD output. Examples include approaches to simplify and automate mesh generation, allow CFD-structural coupling for aeroelastics, surface shape parameterisation and optimisation, system identification, multi-dimensional data interpolation, and adaptive sampling and parameter space metamodelling. All the methods are developed to exploit parallel processing environments, and Professor Allen has acted as Chair of the University's High Performance Computing (HPC) Executive Committee and a member of the University HPC Board. He has also been Head of the Aerospace Engineering Department and the Computer Science Department.