In this paper we report a strategy to simultaneously increase the ductility and strength of bulk nanostructured materials. By engineering very small second-phase particles into a nanostructured Al alloy matrix, we were able to more than double its uniform elongation, while further gaining rather than sacrificing its yield strength. The simultaneous enhancement of ductility and strength is due to the increased dislocation accumulation and resistance to dislocation-slip by second-phase particles, respectively. Our strategy is applicable to many nanostructured alloys and composites, and paves a way for their large-scale industrial applications. The material used in this model study is 7075 Al alloy. The alloy was solution-treated to obtain a coarse-grained (CG) solid solution. The CG sample was immediately cryogenically rolled to produce nanostructures with an average grain size of ca. 100 nm (designated as NS sample). The NS sample was then aged at low temperature to introduce very small secondphase particles (designated as NS+P sample). The engineering stress–strain curves of these samples are compared in Figure 1a. The 0.2 % yield strengths (marked by circles) of the CG, NS, and NS+P samples are 145 MPa, 550 MPa, and 615 MPa, respectively. Therefore, the low-temperature aging enhanced the yield strength of the NS sample by 12 %. The uniform elongation (marked by the symbol on the curves in Fig. 1a) was determined by the Considere criterion (Eq. 1) governing the onset of localized deformation [8]