Brunel lecturer off to South Korea

A FEMALE lecturer from Uxbridge who has been working on the Big Bang experiment will attend an international conference in South Korea next 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 foyr per cent of physics professors are female.

The Seoul conference attendees are hoping to change this in the future by setting up a mutually supportive network and by actively encouraging young female students to take up a career in physics.