Europe faces a situation in which the photonics industry is growing and needs more well-prepared professionals to support its growth, leadership and innovation potential. Addressing this pressing need requires engaging all photonics stakeholders to increase the visibility of the outstanding professional opportunities of photonics and provide the future workforce with tools to increase their employability. CARLA aims to create a new, rigorous and tested instrument to address this need at the source. CARLA will develop a model for European photonics career camp –a reproducible 2-day intense, multi-format event– that 1) gets coordinated input from all stakeholders, 2) encourages STEM university students, PhD students and young postdocs to pursue a career in photonics and 3) can be replicated by other organisations. CARLA will create a robust, competitive and sustainable career camp that will serve as a ready-to-replicate tool, which will be tested through 11 editions implemented during the project. It will incorporate the dimensions of industry, academia, innovation,entrepreneurship, and better employability, putting special attention to empower gender diversity, both within the camps and in the future photonics workforce. CARLA will realize this strong coordinated instrument by using a multidimensional strategy that integrates design, implementation, evaluation and sustainability. CARLA will work hand-in-hand through working groups with all the stakeholders in the design of the camps. It will organize 11 editions of the camp at the Pan-European level, in 10 different countries. It will assess the methodology and scalability of the camp, and evaluate its impact in the short, mid and long-term. Sustainability will be ensured through the engagement of influencers and multipliers, and develop a comprehensive handbook to facilitate replication. Furthermore, CARLA will produce an Empowering Gender Diversity guide with the lessons obtained during the project.

Euro-BioImaging (EuBI) is the pan-European research infrastructure project for imaging technologies in biological and medical sciences and has been on the ESFRI Roadmap since 2008. In close match with the scope and objectives of the INFRADEV2 call, Preparatory Phase II (PPII) funding will enable EuBI: • to finalize the submission and approval procedure of its ERIC statutes with the EC and bring them to signature by the EuBI Member States and EMBL to launch the EuBI-ERIC; • obtain commitments for the sustainable funding for the EuBI-ERIC by its Member States; • implement the operational EuBI Hub and recruit its staff to provide user access and services; • define and sign the service level agreements between EuBI-ERIC and the 1st generation of EuBI Nodes; • establish a procedure to increase EuBI-ERIC membership, so that new countries can continuously join the EuBI-ERIC with clear national benefits and contributions. From Dec 2010 until May 2014, EuBI successfully completed its EU FP7-funded Preparatory Phase I, which addressed key technical and strategic questions and provided a blueprint for infrastructure implementation. 14 European countries (BE, BG, CZ, FI, FR, IL, IT, NO, PL, PT, SK, ES, NL, UK), and the PPI coordinator EMBL have signed the EuBI Memorandum of Understanding to jointly undertake the remaining steps required to draft and submit the EuBI ERIC application to the EC. The MoU signatories constitute the EuBI Interim Board (IB), which now governs the Interim Phase. To maintain the successful momentum of Member State engagement, the EuBI PPII project consortium comprises and is fully supported by all IB Members. We have jointly defined clear and measurable objectives that will bring EuBI to full maturity in order to start operation and provide its services to European researchers immediately upon launch of the EuBI-ERIC. The award of PPII funding would leapfrog the start of EuBI-ERIC user access and service provision by at least 1,5 year’s time or more.