Overview of Recent Results from the STAR experiment

Hard and electromagnetic (EM) probes are excellent tools for studying the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). These probes include jet production and modification, productions of heavy flavor hadrons and quarkonia, and productions of photon and dileptons. They provide essential information to characterize the properties of the QGP such as the parton energy loss mechanism and the temperature, lifetime, and viscosity of the QGP. The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment utilizes t excellent detectors to measure these probes, and provides numerous results via hard and EM probes. This overview reports some of the selected results from e+e− and direct virtual photon productions, heavy flavor hadrons and quarkonia, and jets.