Suhas Eswarappa Prameela was awarded the best poster award at this years 2019 Mach Conference in Annapolis Maryland. Suhas’s research in Tim Weihs’ lab is focused on developing better lightweight armor materials for the US Army. Conventional heat treatment of Magnesium alloys causes long, thin intermetallic particles to precipitate throughout the alloy. These particles are often spaced far apart and offer little resistance to moving dislocations, leading to poor strengthening. By designing efficient thermomechanical processing routes, we show a high density of finely spaced precipitates with a more compact shape in Mg-9Al (wt%) alloy. They theorize that deformation enhances continuous precipitation through dislocation-assisted nucleation. With the collaboration of Michael Falk’s group, they show a massive reduction in nucleation barrier due to atmospheres of Al atoms around the Mg dislocations.