  The heavy ion experiments in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) are going through upgrade in the next five years,
shifting their focus more on the hard processes in the new runs. One of the
main goals is to draw a finer image for the quark gluon plasma (QGP). The heavy
flavor probes , which witness the whole history of heavy ion collision are
particularly sensitive to test the properties of QGP formed in such collisions.
The lattice results for heavy flavor probes provide transport and
phenomenological models crucial inputs to describe the experimental
observations like the strong suppression of the nuclear modification factor
$R_{AA}$ and the non-zero azimuthal anisotropy at low $p_T$. In the last two
years we have seen significant advances in the lattice QCD studies of heavy
flavor probes, including the in-medium quarkonium properties, the complex
static quark-antiquark potential and the heavy quark diffusion from lattice
simulations at nonzero temperature. These achievements substantially deepen our
understanding of the fate of quarkonium, the screening/unscreening of the
complex potential and the temperature and quark mass dependence of the heavy
quark diffusion in thermal medium. In these proceedings, we review recent
results and briefly discuss possible directions in these studies.
