  Heavy meson production in reactions with nuclei is an active new frontier to
understand QCD dynamics and the process of hadronization in nuclear matter.
Measurements in various colliding systems at RHIC and LHC, including Pb-Pb,
Xe-Xe, O-O, p-Pb, and p-O, enable precision tests of the medium-size,
temperature, and mass dependencies of the in-medium parton propagation and
shower formation. We employ a coupled DGLAP evolution framework that takes
advantage of splitting functions recently obtained in soft-collinear effective
theory with Glauber gluons (SCET$_{\rm G}$) and hard thermal loop (HTL)
motivated collisional energy loss effects. With jet quenching effects
constrained to the nuclear modification factor of charged hadrons in Pb-Pb
collisions at 5.02 TeV, we present predictions for light and heavy-meson in
Xe-Xe, O-O and p-Pb collisions at the LHC. We find that the nuclear
modification scales non-trivially with the quark mass and medium properties. In
particular, there can be sizeable collision-induced attenuation of heavy mesons
in small systems such as oxygen-oxygen and high-multiplicity p-Pb events.
Finally, we analyze the impact of different models of initial-state parton
dynamics on the search for QGP signatures in small colliding systems.
