Ultra-relativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) create the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) -- a hot, dense, deconfined state of QCD matter governed by strong interactions. While decades of measurements have established the creation of the QGP, precisely quantifying its transport properties and understanding how emergent hadronic matter forms from deconfined color degrees of freedom remain central challenges. Heavy quarks (charm and bottom) serve as ideal, calibrated tomographic probes of the medium. They are produced in early hard scatterings prior to QGP formation, they experience the full spacetime evolution of the system while interacting with the medium. In this talk, I review recent measurements of heavy-flavor production and dynamics in heavy-ion collisions, examine what their energy loss and collective behavior reveal about medium properties, and discuss future prospects for the field.
Deepa Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining the faculty, she was a postdoctoral researcher and Research Associate at UT Austin. She earned her PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on experimental high-energy nuclear physics, and she is an active member of both the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC and the ePIC Collaboration at the EIC.