YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The Youngstown Innovation Hub for Aerospace and Defense is many months away from occupancy.
Megan Malara knows it can’t be ready soon enough.
The plan is to have construction documents completed in time to break ground in late spring or early summer, Malara, the hub’s executive director, explains during a tour of the hub’s home. The hub will be in the downtown Youngstown building where The Vindicator newspaper was printed until the company closed in 2019.
“We are kind of hard pressed to get this building up and running as soon as possible because we do have people that are ready and waiting to get in the building,” she says.
Personal History
In February, Gov. Mike DeWine, Lt. Gov., Jim Tressel and Ohio Department of Development Director Lydia Mihalik joined local officials to announce that Ohio would establish the state’s fourth innovation hub in Youngstown.
Malara was named the hub’s first executive director in October. Earlier in 2025, she recalls, she had been talking about what she describes as a “five-year plan” to move back to the Valley and use her skills to make something with an impact.
“It’s very grounding to be back home,” she reflects.
Growing up in Hubbard, Malara recognized at an early age that she was good at math and enjoyed it.
“I enjoyed having a problem that was perceivably solvable in front of me,” she says. Early in high school, she became interested in the biomedical side of engineering – “how you can design a material to get certain properties you need out of it” – and how to use those skills to have an impact on people’s lives.
Family and teachers supported her in her academic pursuits, she says. She “almost benefited” from not knowing how underrepresented women were in the engineering field, though she recognized that as she got older. In some of her college classes, she was the only woman in the room, a situation she says she still encounters today.
She received a full-ride scholarship to Ohio State University – where the first-generation college graduate would earn her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in materials science and engineering – through a generous local family in her hometown that annually provides funds for four students to attend the university.
“I was really fortunate to get that scholarship,” she reflects. “Having that financial support and not having that burden, I was able to take on volunteer research positions in undergraduate and things that I wouldn’t be able to do had I been trying to pay my way through school.”
She became interested in biomedical engineering because she wanted to look at how to design prosthetics for individuals who had had a limb amputated, but the major was “quite selective,” and she didn’t get in immediately. That led her to look at different avenues.
“Materials science is quite broad,” she says. “Anything you can think of is probably made of material, right? And there’s somebody that needs to figure out how to make that.”
Early on, Malara participated in research into designing materials to sort different cancer cells, specifically breast cancer cells, she says. The bulk of her research, especially into her doctorate, was around skin tissue engineering to assist patients with extensive burns covering so much of their body that there isn’t sufficient healthy tissue for doctors to expand and graft.
“There are commercially available products that will help restore some of the function, but leave patients very scarred and with limited functionality,” she says. Her research involved attempting to design a substrate that would more closely mimic normal skin’s appearance and behavior and would improve patients’ quality of life.
After completing graduate school, Malara moved to Washington, D.C., for the policy fellowship, and later became interested in returning to Ohio. OSU’s Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence had recently launched a medical branch, and she joined it to help build that out. “I enjoyed being able to see the impact of my work,” she
reflects.
Opportunity to Return
The opening at the newly established defense hub in Youngstown created an opening to return to the Valley.
“Megan, in the first conversation, underscored that she wants to give back to the community that gave her the opportunity,” according to Alex Steeb, senior director of operations at America Makes, the national additive manufacturing institute established in Youngstown in 2012. “She was just generally invested, authentically invested, in giving back to the community and supporting growth and prosperity for the Valley.”
Malara had several qualities that set her apart from other candidates, Steeb, who served as the hiring manager for the hub’s executive director search, says.
Those qualities include Malara’s technical acumen and her work in additive manufacturing; her experience in incubation and applied research in advanced manufacturing, including at Ohio State University, where she served as director of the Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence’s Medical Modeling Materials and Manufacturing Division; and her time as a policy fellow in the office of former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Most important was that she was from the Mahoning Valley, he adds. A “non-negotiable” priority from the beginning of the search was finding someone who either already lives here, “which was, frankly, our preference,” or would be a “boomerang” returning to the area.
That Malara was from the area and wanted to return “was such a big, big plus that she really was an obvious choice,” Barb Ewing, CEO of YBI – formerly known as the Youngstown Business Incubator – affirms.
“I’m not saying there weren’t other good candidates, because there certainly were other good candidates, but they really wanted somebody who would have a stake in the community, and she provided that hands down,” she says.
OSU’s CDME has “a somewhat similar mission” to the new manufacturing hub, in that its goal is to improve the domestic manufacturing competitiveness toward national security, Malara says. The focus of the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining, which manages the hub as well as America Makes, “is never a fair fight for the warfighter,” she points out.
“We want to have the strongest defense industrial base here so that we can, at a moment’s notice, be able to support the security of our country,” she continues. “Manufacturing competitiveness, whether that’s in the innovation space or just the sheer amount of manufacturing capability we have here, is a deterrent.
“That’s really our focus here, making sure that we have onshore capabilities in innovative technologies and across the supply chain at every level, so that we are able to best support [defense] needs and ultimately our national security.”
Malara also notes that Ohio is among the aerospace industry’s top three suppliers. “And if you look at manufacturers across this area, whether that’s in machining, heat treating, 3-D printing, we have businesses here that supply the defense industrial base, and we need to make sure that they have what they need to continue doing that and continue evolving to the needs of the Department of Defense,” she says.
Much of Malara’s early weeks on the job have focused on connecting with partners of the hub, including YBI, Youngstown State University, Lake to River Economic Development, and Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber. She and members of the team also have been engaging with local manufacturers.
“We were just at a local manufacturer this week, trying to see how we can connect them to Defense needs, and how we can help evolve their processes and grow them into different product lines,” Malara says.
Beyond the efforts to attract companies to the area and help existing local firms, the hub also will be focused on education and workforce development.
“The community is very invested in this project as well,” she says. “One of the things that I think is important is that we’re communicating the vision for what’s going to happen here and how people can be involved.”
Both YBI’s Ewing and America Makes’ Steeb express satisfaction with Malara’s performance so far.
“It’s going great,” YBI’s Ewing says. Malara definitely is “drinking from the wide end of the fire hose” but is handling it with grace.
“She is digging in and getting up to speed very quickly, and we’re thrilled to have her as part of the team,” she adds. “She’s going to be a great leader.”
Malara has hit all of the early goals for the hub and is engaging with stakeholders and the community, as well as “actively driving” with visitors, Steeb says.
“She’s making steady progress and just working off the punch list of things that need to get done,” he remarks.
Demand is Strong
As the Hubbard native strolls around flooring that just six years ago supported multi-ton printing presses, she notes several companies have expressed interest, including tenants in YBI’s main building and Tech Block Building #5. Some tenants could be in by the end of 2026, depending on the ability to accommodate a particular tenant’s needs.
In the interim, the hub is working with YBI and other local economic development partners to find sites before the building is ready.
“There’s so many good bones here for manufacturing,” Malara says. “This really will facilitate those companies to have the resources and facility that they need to be productive.”
Malara currently is renting a place in Youngstown while she looks for a permanent place and works on selling the house in Columbus she shares with her partner, who is working on relocating his job here, and their four cats.
She also is enjoying spending time with her father, who still lives here, and reconnecting with her home community, she says.
“I will say it’s very grounding to be back home,” she remarks. “Even driving up here, the transition from a very flat, central Ohio to the hills and the trees, I get this calmness of the feeling of coming back home.”
Pictured at top: Megan Malara is executive director of the Youngstown Innovation Hub for Aerospace and Defense.
