Groningen university is to receive a €6.6m subsidy from the European Union towards its policy of developing more female professors.

The university has set aside €10m for the Rosalind Franklin Fellowship which will offer 30 female researchers the opportunity to pursue a professorship.

The grant will be on offer in 2014 and the university aims to raise the number of female professors to 25% in 2015. At the moment, 19.2% of professors are female.

Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1959, was a Briitish biophysicist whose data was critical to the discovering of the DNA double helix.