Dr. Emilio Pack remembers well the time he bumped into one of his former middle schoolers on campus at Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Pack was overjoyed to see one of his former students, and asked what she was studying.

“No, Dr. Pack. I don’t go to school here. I work in the cafeteria,” he remembers her saying. He was devastated: “I want our kids to go to the university, not work at the university.”

Since then, Pack has been on a mission to help students, particularly female minority students, prepare for success in college and careers.

Pack was not a stranger to poverty and educational inequity. As a child, he watched his mother — a trained dentist in Cuba but unable to practice in Los Angeles — illegally pull teeth in their family’s bathroom to scrape by before gathering all the resources she could and relocating her family to San Marino, where her son would have access to a high-quality education.

“I realized very quickly that my education prepared me in a way that was very different from all of my cousins and friends that I left behind in my old neighborhood,” he said.

In 2006, Pack opened what eventually became one of the highest performing high schools in all of Los Angeles, Alliance Dr. Olga Mohan High School. In 2013, he founded STEM Prep, a high school that offers special coursework in engineering, biomedicine, and computer engineering, and helps to connect students with jobs and internships to start thinking about potential careers.

Ninety-six percent of the students Pack serves are eligible for free and reduced price lunch. When his freshman class started, only one in four of the students were outperforming the national average on the NWEA math and English assessment, a nationally normed benchmark exam. Now in their junior year, Dr. Pack says, more than four in five students are outperforming national averages.

Last year, STEM Prep was admitted to the Charter School Growth Fund’s Emerging CMO Fund, which is supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

The Charter School Growth Fund created the Emerging CMO Fund to help talented education leaders of color expand already successful small charter management organizations to networks of between two and five schools. The Fund advised Pack, helping him to add a middle school to his network focused on inquiry-based learning. By the 2016–17 school year, STEM Prep will serve nearly 1,000 students across its middle and high school grades. Pack said the Fund has opened doors for him — giving him access to sound advice and enabling him to meet and get advice from a broad network of education thinkers and practitioners.

Pack said his impact on students has two dimensions: he’s helping students progress academically, and he’s inspiring them. “Every day, students see you, and you look like them. And they believe they can be you.”

The deadline for 2016 applications to the Emerging CMO Fund is February 12. Potential applicants can learn more or apply online.