In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Matthew Allen, associate director emeritus of the storage ring group at SLAC. Allen recounts his childhood in Scotland. He discusses his education at the University of Edinburgh and his experiences as a draftee during the Korean War. Allen discusses his decision to move to the United States and the circumstances leading to his graduate work at Stanford, where he developed wide-band traveling waves tubes. Allen discusses the numerous projects he worked on at SLAC and the development of the storage ring program. In the last part of the interview, Allen reflects on how SLAC has changed over the decades and on his major contributions to the lab.