Quark and Gluon Degrees of Freedom in High-Energy Heavy Ion Collisions

I discuss some recent progress in our understanding of high energy nuclear collisions. I will focus on two topics which I was lucky to co-pioneer in the recent past. One is recombination of quarks and its interpretation as a signal for deconfinement, the second is electromagnetic radiation from jets passing through a quark gluon plasma. This talk was given during the award ceremony for the 2007 IUPAP Young Scientist Award.