Senior Superintendent: Building Breakthrough Healthcare

In 1989, Lewis senior superintendent Shane Weller’s grandfather Bill brought him to the Boeing Red Barn at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

The structure, the country’s oldest surviving aircraft factory, held special meaning for the Weller family. It was there that Bill closed out his carpentry career in 1983, working on the barn’s restoration before retiring. And the project’s superintendent was none other than Shane’s father and Bill’s son.

As they walked the two-story structure and its exhibits that day, Bill would stop to show his 18-year-old grandson a detail here and a challenge overcome there.

“Well, what’d you think?” he asked Shane when it was time to go. “Want to be a carpenter?”

“Well, sure!” Shane remembers answering.

That same afternoon, they drove to the Carpenters’ Union Building together, where Shane signed up to become a member. In doing so, he set himself on a path to becoming a third-generation builder. (His uncle was also a carpenter.)

“I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” Shane recalls. “It felt like a good thing and it’s turned out to be a great career.”

Shane joined Lewis as a carpenter in 1999, first working on the Seaboard Building renovation project in downtown Seattle before being promoted to foreman. In 2002, he took over as superintendent at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. He’s been a fixture there ever since.

While most superintendents tend to move on after projects are complete, Shane has chosen to stay on and support Fred Hutch.

The variety of the work and the mission have kept him coming back.

“I really feel strongly about what I do here,” he said on a recent Thursday morning from a rooftop deck that overlooks Lake Union. “Helping cure cancer—it’s pretty awesome. It’s not just building a building and walking away. In this work, we’re helping people live.”

A typical weekday for Shane begins with a 2:45 a.m. alarm, a 20-minute drive to work, and a 4 a.m. arrival at Fred Hutch’s 15-acre South Lake Union campus.

The reason for such an early start time? To check in with the Lewis foremen ending their overnight shifts while settling in and welcoming a new crew.

This synchronized effort is meant to make the entire team as “invisible” as possible during the busiest times on campus and to minimize construction-related disruptions for patients and families, researchers, clinicians, and staff members.

Lewis and subcontractors UMC and Prime Electric are co-located in a wedge-shaped building that borders Fairview Avenue. The office is built into an interstitial space between the first and second floors. Shane jokes that it’s a lot like the 7 ½th-floor in the cult classic film “Being John Malkovich.” (Unlike in the movie, however, this office has perfectly normal floor-to-ceiling-heights, and plenty of overhead clearance for the six-foot-three Shane.)

Sometimes, people who aren’t familiar with the team or its portfolio of work ask about Lewis’ “Fred Hutch project,” to which project manager Jacki Dunlap usually responds, “Which one?” She gestures in the direction of a hanging dry-erase board in the office, which lists more than 20.

Lewis superintendent Shane Weller surveys a model of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s South Lake Union campus, where Lewis has had an active presence since 1999.

Many of the buildings on the Fred Hutch campus are now several decades old. Lewis has re-roofed most of them and is responsible for ongoing enhancements.

As the lead superintendent on Lewis’ sustaining work at Fred Hutch, Shane engages directly with clinicians and principal investigators who are at the forefront of groundbreaking discoveries.

His first ever project involved renovating a space for research on three spine stickleback fish. He’s since worked with investigators including Dr. Mark Roth, past winner of a Mac Arthur “Genius Grant,” whose team is looking at how suspended animation can transform emergency medicine.

When it comes to research facilities, Lewis helps adapt and reconfigures labs when new teams form or when new ways of working emerge. This includes the recent push for flexible spaces that can better accommodate the pace of innovation and more collaboration…