Bio/CV
Richard Allen serves as Interim Vice Chancellor for Research with overall responsibility for UC Berkeley’s research endeavors starting on August 1, 2026. He provides primary leadership in research policy, planning, and administration, including relations between the university and industry, research compliance, research communications, and research support for the Berkeley campus. His administrative portfolio includes management of over fifty campus research units, twelve research museums and remote field stations, and research administration offices including the Office of Research Administration and Compliance, the Office of Laboratory Animal Care, the Office of the Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer and the Office of Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA).
Richard Allen is the Director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab and the Class of 1954 Endowed Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. Professor Allen previously served as the interim dean for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and chair for the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. A leading voice in global seismic safety, he also serves as a member of the Earthquake Team at Google.
As a seismologist, his research interests span deep Earth structure, the earthquake source, and hazard reduction through societal engagement. His group uses seismic imaging techniques to constrain dynamic processes at tectonic boundaries, and his focus on real-time seismology has led to the development of earthquake early warning systems now used around the globe. He links scientific and technological advances to practical, societally-relevant hazard reduction, including through the development of the smartphone-based citizen-science oriented MyShake network.
His research has been featured in Science, Nature, Scientific American, the New York Times and dozens of other media outlets around the world. His original early warning algorithm was named in Discover Magazine’s top 100 science stories for 2003, and became the backbone for ShakeAlert, the U.S. earthquake early warning system. MyShake was an inspiration for Google's global Android Earthquake Alerts system, which was named one of the greatest innovations in 2020 by Popular Science. Most recently his work with the Android Earthquake Alerting System was recognized as a "Top 10 Breakthrough" of 2025 by PhysicsWorld.
Professor Allen has a BA from the University of Cambridge, a PhD from Princeton University, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.
