Eight months into his role leading process piping at Heffron, the 104-year-old Mid-Atlantic contractor, Mustafa is making the case that the biggest gains in pharmaceutical construction happen long before anyone breaks ground.
Ask Samir Mustafa how he keeps track of time, and he won’t reach for a calendar. He’ll reference the buildings and projects he’s worked on.
“My oldest daughter was born when we were building at LSM for Human Genome Sciences (HGS),” he says, referring to the large-scale manufacturing plant that became his first superintendent role. “My youngest was born when we were doing several MedImmune buildings (now AstraZeneca). That’s how I keep track of time — projects.”
Mustafa’s career maps almost perfectly onto the growth of the Mid-Atlantic’s pharmaceutical manufacturing base. He started as a first-year apprentice on a pharma project, a member of Local 602 out of Washington, D.C. Three months in, he was orbital welding stainless steel tubing. Four years later he was running work as a foreman. He came up through some of the region’s most iconic builds from the early HGS campus, the large-scale manufacturing plant – which was recently purchased by Samsung Biologics, and several expansions at the state’s largest biopharma campus in Gaithersburg.
Since last September, Mustafa has brought that two-decade arc to Heffron, where he now leads the company’s process piping business. This was a deliberate expansion for a firm whose client base has long been concentrated in pharma but whose footprint had not yet fully extended into the process side.
Conditioning Space for Product
The first thing Mustafa wants to clear up is what process piping actually is. “It’s not just the clean room, the shiny stuff,” he says. “Mechanical is about conditioning a space for people. Process is about conditioning a space for product.”
That distinction matters enormously in biopharma, where the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in regulatory exposure and ruined batches. The horror stories rarely surface at the moment they happen he shared. A system gets turned over, looking clean and functional, and three months later a million-dollar batch goes in the trash because of contamination — a wrong valve, a wrong actuator, a vent line opening at the wrong point in a control sequence.
It’s why Mustafa is blunt about what the discipline demands. “A lot of people think, these are process guys because they orbital weld,” he says. “That’s the easy part. First you’ve got to put a procedure in place for quality control, for safety, for inventorying material, for documentation. The list goes on.”
“Mechanical is about conditioning a space for people. Process is about conditioning a space for product.”
Bring Us In Early
If there is one message Mustafa returns to, it is this: bring the trade partner in early, and let them be a true partner in the design. “A lot of times you have silos designing these buildings, and there’s no constructability feedback whatsoever,” he says. “I don’t mean let us do all the calcs for you. But let us influence the constructability side of it.”
The cost of skipping that step is hidden but enormous. He describes the stretch between the moment a project is funded and the moment shovels hit the ground as a window where time and innovation quietly drain away. “You lose so much opportunity,” he says. “So much innovation goes out the window, because now you’re in a hurry to start instead of being in a hurry to design something you can actually finish.”
Mustafa has seen the alternative firsthand. He has traveled to China to study how modular pharmaceutical facilities are built there, and the difference he came back with wasn’t about technology or labor — it was about posture. “The one thing they do different is they’re very accommodating,” he says. “Nothing is too big for them. They’re willing to put the extra effort into the design to let it mature.”
Legos, Work Packages, and the Wow Factor
Mustafa describes his approach with a deceptively simple image: Legos. “I look at jobs as parts and assemblies,” he says. “Piping, supports, structural components — it’s a Lego piece at the end of the day.” Breaking a project into sub-assemblies shapes how the work is built, how time is tracked, how work packages are written so crews know exactly what they’re doing day to day.
It also shapes what gets fabricated off-site versus stick-built in place. Mustafa’s instinct is to push as much work as possible into a controlled environment — modularize a system, pre-fabricate before it reaches the site, run another pre-assembly on the ground before it’s rigged into the building. The logic is partly safety, and partly a frustration he can’t let go of: “Bringing trash and debris from construction into the building, then trying to figure out a way to get it back out, is mind-boggling to me.” The more work that happens in the shop, the more a contractor can control speed, safety, and quality at once.
“We want to give clients that one wow factor,” he says. “That thing they can walk away from and say, ‘I can’t believe we did that. That was cutting edge.’ Building up our fabrication and modular capabilities, and giving clients in the area a true partner — that’s what I want to bring here.”
“If you go in day one saying I’m going to prefabricate 100 percent, maybe I come away doing 70 — still better than the 30 you’d get the other way.”
Choreographing Integrated Project Delivery
Mustafa is an advocate for Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), which he describes as a way to “take the handcuffs off of innovation.” Under IPD, the mechanical contractor has a real stake in the electrical contractor’s success and vice versa; the best person for a task does the task, without a change order or a scope dispute slowing things down.
“It allows you to leave your brass at the door,” he says. “When it comes together, it’s almost like a choreographed dance. Everything’s in harmony — and the schedules are real. When can you ever say that?” IPD hasn’t gained the traction on the East Coast that it has out West, and it only works when built on trust. But the deeper principle doesn’t require the contract at all. A project gets built five different times before it’s done — in design, in estimating, in pre-construction. “It becomes muscle memory,” he says. “You’re going to get a better product.” What he sees instead, constantly, are teams fixated on a steel start date, erecting it before the rest of the building is designed. “We could shave three months off the back of the job. But everybody’s so enamored with the start date.”
Designing for a Modular Future
The industry Mustafa is building for is one where change is the only constant: new modalities, decentralized production, continuous manufacturing, and a steady push toward flexible, modular facilities. That shift raises the stakes on his early-collaboration message, because modularity is a decision that has to be made on day one.
“Anybody who thinks they’re going to build a modular assembly or a pipe rack in a vacuum is fooling themselves,” he says. If a structure is designed with its steel standing on its own, a modular build often isn’t possible. But if he’s in the room with the structural engineer from the start, the design can do double duty — steel sized to support the systems running through it, an integrated basket for the worker operating the chain fall, a cradle designed for the lift. With capacity demand climbing and timelines compressing, Mustafa sees modular and prefab capability not as a premium offering but as a baseline requirement.
Why Heffron
Mustafa has worked alongside Heffron for years — the HGS campus team, he recalls, brought together Heffron, Gilbane, Kinetics and others, and remains one of his favorite jobs because of how well that group worked together. So when the opportunity came to lead the firm’s move into process piping, it wasn’t an unknown quantity. It was a known culture.
“At this point in my career, it wasn’t about chasing the big jobs or the loudest company,” he says. “It’s actually enjoyable to come to work.” He credits the tone set by owners Colin and George. “You can tell they really emphasize relationships. That meshed well with my approach — being a good listener. That’s something I think we lose in our industry. Everybody wants to tell people what they want, instead of listening to what they’re asking for.”
It’s the same thread that runs through everything he describes — the early-design collaboration, the IPD ethos, the partnership model. A 104-year-old firm with a wall of safety awards doesn’t keep earning major contracts by accident. “Culture, safety, quality — they all go hand in hand,” he says, “and it starts at the top.”
As for what he’s building, Mustafa keeps the ambition specific and the pace deliberate: a one-stop shop for clients large and small, the premier process and mechanical piping provider in the DMV, and the fabrication and modular capabilities to match. “We have a saying — go slow to go fast,” he says. Then, the line that doubles as a mission statement: “I can’t wait to see where this thing goes.”
Samir Mustafa leads the process piping business at Heffron, a 104-year-old Mid-Atlantic contractor serving the region's life sciences industry. This profile is part of BioBuzz's ongoing People of the Industry series.
