Dr. Allewell received a B.Sc. (Hon.) degree in Biochemistry from McMaster University (Hamilton, Ont., Canada) and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from Yale University. She was the recipient of an undergraduate General Motors Scholarship and graduate Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She was a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University and has taken sabbaticals at the University of Pennsylvania and University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Allewell has been Dean of the College of Chemical and Life Sciences at the University of Maryland since 2000. Dr. Allewell was a faculty member at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (1970-1973), Wesleyan University (Connecticut) (1973-1991), and the University of Minnesota (1991-1998). While at Wesleyan University she was founding chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, and during her tenure at the University of Minnesota she chaired the Department of Biochemistry (1991-5) and was Vice Provost (1995-9). In 1999 she moved to Harvard University, where she was Associate Vice President for Sponsored Programs and Technology Transfer.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Allewell has served on many review panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She has also been a member and chair of the advisory board for the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank, the National Research Council (NRC) space studies board committee on space biology and medicine, and the NRC task group on institutional arrangements for space station research. She is a past president of the Biophysical Society and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and the NSF Biological Sciences Advisory Committee.

She currently serves on the Advisory Boards of the Children’s Research Institute, Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC) and the Center for Gene Structure and Function of Hunter College, City University of New York. She is a former member of the editorial boards of the Biophysical Journal and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, a former associate editor of Biopolymers and a current associate editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. In 2002 Dr. Allewell received the Emily M. Gray Award from the Biophysical Society in recognition of her significant contributions to education in biophysics. She was inducted into McMaster University’s Alumni Gallery in 2000 and received an Honorary Doctorate from McMaster University in 2007.

Dr. Allewell's research deals with the molecular mechanisms of biological function and regulation of multi subunit proteins. Her current research, in collaboration with Dr. Mendel Tuchman at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, studies the biochemical basis of diseases of nitrogen metabolism. She was the recipient of both a Research Career Development Award and a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. She has taught and advised undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows both in the laboratory and in the classroom and is current Principal Investigator for the University of Maryland’s grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in support of its HHMI Undergraduate Program in the Biological Sciences.