Allan is a Fellow of the SPIE  and is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and 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. 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 is Secretary of the European Physical Society, Quantum Electronics and Optics Division. His principal research activities cover linear and nonlinear surface polaritons on negative index media, solitons in nonlinear magneto-optics, 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 260 papers in major journals, the presenter of 240 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 is a Topical Editor for the Journal of the Optical Society of America B for Metamaterials and Photonic Structures and is now appointed Topical Editor for Metamaterials and Photonic Structures for the UK institute of Physics Journal of Optics. He is going to be Chair of the UK Photon10 meeting which will be located at Southampton University and is the latest in the biennial series of the largest UK optics meetings ever held