Gabrielle Allen is the Founding Director of the School of Computing at the University of Wyoming, where she is also a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy. She received a B.S. in Mathematics from Nottingham University in 1988, completed Part III of the Math Tripos (MASt) at Cambridge University in 1989, and received a PhD in Physics from Cardiff University in 1993. She has previously held academic positions in interdisciplinary computational science at Cardiff University, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Louisiana State University, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 2011 to 2012 she served as a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Her research work has focused on the development and application of scientific community software, including the Cactus Framework, Einstein Toolkit, and Grid Application Toolkit. While her work has focused on the modeling of black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves, she has worked in diverse disciplinary fields including computer science, education, petroleum engineering, computational chemistry, coastal modeling, and computational fluid dynamics. Dr. Allen was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize in Supercomputing in 2001, the IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge award in 2009, and the High-Performance Bandwidth Challenge award in 2002. In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.