Twisted was a two-day conference on the physics, chemistry and applications of cholesteric lyotropic liquid crystals developing in colloidal suspensions of chiral nanorods, held at the University of Luxembourg, May 10-12, 2017. The motivation for the conference was the rapidly growing interest in liquid crystals formed by nanocrystals of cellulose or chitin, filamentous viruses, carbon nanotubes and similar rod-like nanoparticles in suspensions in water or other isotropic solvents. We covered the spectrum from fundamental scientific challenges to application opportunities, organized into four topical sessions:

1. Advanced materials derived from chiral nanorods (keynote speaker: Mark MacLachlan)
2. Theory and simulations of cholesteric phases (keynote speaker: Mark Wilson)
3. Chiral nanorod suspensions: from particle tuning to self-assembly (keynote speaker: Derek Gray)
4. The route to applications (keynote speaker: Silvia Vignolini)

In addition to our four keynote speakers, we had 8 invited speakers:

• Session 1: Lena Godinho, Olli Ikkala
• Session 2: Claudio Zannoni, Paul van der Schoot
• Session 3: Rik Wensink, Zvonimir Dogic
• Session 4: Lennart Bergström, Youssef Habibi

There were also 12 contributed talks and two poster sessions. See the program for full details.

The registration cost was 210€. This covered two dinners (get-together + farewell), two lunches and four coffee breaks as well as the conference attendance.

Below is the conference photo. For participants, other photos can be seen here.