Years ago, while Christopher L. Maury Jr. was studying civil engineering at Tufts University, he would look forward to his summer vacations, when he was back on Nantucket – the island where he grew up – working with his hands and building houses with his father and namesake.
Even then, the younger Maury was a veteran of the building industry – he had started designing and building structures with his father when he was just 15 years old.
And that small-scale, design-intensive work got into his system. That’s why he was irritated by the inefficiency of the large-scale work he did while interning for one of the large contractors working on the “Big Dig” project. After that experience, Maury decided that he needed to be better equipped to handle large projects and went back to school, earning a master’s in construction, engineering and management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Afterward, he found a home at Shawmut Design & Construction, where after just a decade of employment he’s in charge of the firm’s Rhode Island office. He now leads a team of 58 Rhode Island employees.
“The firm recognized a talented manager of projects and people and quickly promoted him to new position after new position,” Michael Potter, Shawmut’s managing director of marketing, recently wrote about Maury in the latter’s 40 Under Forty application. He added that after Maury was promoted several times in the first few years he “continued to excel, delivering outstanding projects for Shawmut while maintaining strong levels of client service and developing strong teams underneath him.”
Maury now leads large projects, including Bryant University’s $7.5 million Interfaith Center and the $21 million conversion of Brown University’s J. Walter Wilson Office from a biology lab into administrative space. •
