Allen is lead technical consultant in the areas of reaction engineering and process modelling. He has unparalleled expertise in the field of reaction engineering, a crucial area of overlap with synthetic and physical chemistry.
Allen is a highly experienced engineer with a strong industrial pedigree and deep insight into the manufacturing practices of the chemical industry. Prior to joining LyraChem, he was the founder and Technical Director of BatchCAD, a software company specialising in process simulation for the batch chemical industry. Under his direction, BatchCAD developed and licensed its simulation products across the industry with eighty-three users in Europe, sixty-three in the US and twenty-four in Japan and the rest of the world. Customers ranged from small chemical companies with fewer than forty staff to the majority of major chemical and pharmaceutical corporations such as Shell, Glaxo, Pfizer, Mitsubishi, Dow and DuPont. The software has also been used as part of the joint Russian / American chemical weapons destruction program. The company was acquired by GSE Systems in April 1999, after which he was appointed Vice President of Advanced Technology and later acted as senior consultant during the initial planning of Avantium Technologies, eventually acting as Vice President of Advanced Technologies. In this role, he made significant contributions to workflow analysis, specification of technical requirements and introduced modelling and simulation capabilities to extend the scope of high throughput technologies to process development and scale up.
By training, he is a chemical engineer with a BSc in Chemistry and PhD in Chemical Engineering and he has authored/co-authored over forty articles in scientific journals, conferences and books and given over twenty invited presentations. He has acted as a consultant for more than thirty companies, specialising in applying modelling, and simulation to a range of batch chemical and pharmaceutical processes from laboratory optimisation through to scale up and production.
