A female lecturer from Uxbridge who has been working on the Big Bang experiment will attend an international conference in South Korea this week.

Physicist Dr Dawn Leslie will take a break from her work at Brunel University to take part in the third International Conference on Women in Physics (ICWIP) from the 8-10 October.

The three day conference will be attended by 300 physicists from different countries around the globe from Albania to Zimbabwe.

Dr Leslie, 29, a lecturer at Brunel is also currently working on the Large Hadron Collider at Switzerland, the experiment which attempted the recreate the Big Bang.

She said: "My particular interest is encouraging pupils, especially girls, to continue to study physics at A-Level and beyond.

"This is an especially exciting time in science and engineering - the current work in Switzerland provides excellent examples of the range of opportunities available to those with a scientific education. Attending ICWIP is a fantastic opportunity to share education practices and ideas with physicists from across the world."

Currently, only 21 per cent of UK physics undergraduates are women, and only 4 per cent of physics professors are female.

The industry is hoping to change this in the future by setting up a support network and by actively encouraging young female students to take up a career in physics.