Harvard will grant up to 12 postdoctoral chemistry fellowships this spring targeted at women and underrepresented groups, part of the University’s ongoing effort to expand opportunities for women and minorities in the sciences.

“It was a desire for a long time...specifically in chemistry, to increase minorities and females in the department,” said Anthony R. Shaw, Jr., the director of laboratories in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB), which announced the program on Monday.

The fellows will receive financial support for one year with the possibility of extending the fellowship for a second year.

Harvard will spend $2.8 million on the initiative over a five-year period and plans to conduct an annual review to examine the number and the quality of the candidates as the program develops. More than half of the funding will come from a division of the provost’s office, the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity, according to Shaw.

Representatives of the office, which was created in the wake of then-president Lawrence H. Summers’ controversial remarks about women in the sciences, did not return requests for comment yesterday.

Shaw said that the department’s efforts to increase the presence of underrepresented groups crystallized under CCB chair Andrew G. Myers and the 2005 Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.

The task force, one of two formed in the fallout of Summers’ Jan. 2005 comments, was designed to promote gender diversity in the faculty and to increase the presence of women in science.

In conjunction with these task forces, Summers promised $50 million over 10 years to initiatives for the University’s women and minorities.

Even with the help of the provost’s office in developing and funding the CCB’s fellowships, other Harvard science departments said that similar programs may not be feasible.

“This requires substantial funds that [the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology] does not have available at this time to consider developing such a program,” OEB department chair Andrew A. Biewener wrote in e-mail.

The rest of the funds will come from an endowment left to the chemistry department by Mary Fieser, an organic chemistry textbook author and researcher at Harvard, who died in 1997.

Fieser completed her master’s degree in organic chemistry at Radcliffe College in 1932—a time when few women pursued graduate studies in chemistry.

—Staff writer Madeline W. Lissner can be reached at mlissner@fas.harvard.edu.