Allan is a Fellow of the SPIE and is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is well-known both in the UK and globally for his work on surface plasmons and guided wave optics, especially nonlinear waves and solitons. He is the leading theorist looking at nonlinear guided magnetooptic waves in metamaterials and is a new co-Chair of the globally leading SPIE Photonics Europe held biannually in Brussels. This is in addition to being the co-Chair of SPIE Annual Optics and Photonics meeting in San Diego, USA each year.He is Professor of Applied Physics and holds a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Durham UK. He has organized many conferences and been a Director of a number of NATO Advanced Study Institutes. He is Vice-President of the United Kingdom Consortium for Optics and Photonics (UKCPO), Chair of the UK Optics and Photonics division of the Institute of Physics. He was also Secretary of the European Physical Society, Quantum Electronics and Optics Division for a while. His principal research activities cover linear and nonlinear surface waves, both electromagnetic and acoustic, on negative index and more complex metamaterials, solitons in nonlinear gyroelectric media, nonlinear electromagnetic modeling, nonlinear microwave magnetics, complex microwave materials, magneto-photonic band gap phenomena, dissipative solitons and electromagnetic modeling for mm-wave devices and EMC problems. He is the author of more than 280 papers with 3498 citations and h=26 in major journals, the presenter of 293 conference papers, the author/editor of 7 books, a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal Nonlinear Optics and editor of Advances in Nonlinear Optics. He was a Topical Editor for the Journal of the Optical Society of America B for Metamaterials and Photonic Structures for the period 2003-11 and was appointed Topical Editor for Metamaterials and Photonic Structures for the UK institute of Physics Journal of Optics during 2008-10. He was the Chair of the UK Photon10 meeting which was located at Southampton University and is part of a biennial series of the largest UK optics meetings ever held.