  We review recent progress in the theoretical description of hard probes in
heavy-ion collisions within the framework of Soft Collinear Effective Theory
(SCET). Firstly, we consider the inclusive production of heavy flavor mesons
and jets with a small radius parameter in proton-proton collisions. Secondly,
we describe how in-medium effects can be incorporated consistently with the
proton-proton baseline calculations. The in-medium interactions are described
by Glauber gluon interactions. We present results for the nuclear modification
factor $R_{AA}$ which is most commonly used to study the quenching of hadron or
jet production yields in heavy-ion collisions and we compare to recent data
from the LHC.
