London  - British physicist Stephen Hawking is expected to make a "full recovery" after undergoing a series of tests in a hospital in Cambridge, a spokesman for Cambridge University said Tuesday.

The 67-year-old scientist, who is wheelchair-bound and speaks with the help of a voice synthesizer as a result of a motor neurone disease, was rushed to hospital Monday and described as being "very ill."

He was diagnosed with amyothropic lateral sclerosis (ASL) in 1963, when he was just 21 years old.

"Professor Hawking remains in hospital," said a university spokesman Tuesday. "But he is in a comfortable condition and is expected to make a full recovery."

Hawking, author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time, read physics at Oxford University before switching to Cambridge to carry out research in cosmology to become one of the world's leading experts on gravity and "black holes."

He made a zero-gravity space flight in 2007 and was last seen in public last September.

Hawking worked at Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for more than 30 years and since 1979 has been the University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.(dpa)