The ALICE experiment at CERN was designed to study the properties of the strongly-interacting hot and dense matter created in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC energies. Hard partons propagating through such a medium lose energy via multiple scattering and gluon radiation: this reflects in a modification of the transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$) spectra of the final-state hadrons since their yields at high $p_{\rm T}$ are suppressed compared to the reference values from a simple superposition of incoherent proton-proton collisions.
Results on the suppression patterns for identified hadrons with and without strangeness content can be connected with the predicted energy loss dependence on the parton mass, while the comparison of baryon and meson suppressions at high $p_{\rm T}$ can probe different energy losses for quarks and gluons. In addition, results from Pb-Pb collisions compared with the corresponding measurements carried out in p-Pb allow to investigate possible contributions due to initial-state nuclear matter effects.