Relativistic heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide us with a window to the physics of the early universe by recreating the primordial state of nuclear matter, the quark gluon plasma. To investigate the properties of this strongly interacting collection of deconfined partons, the bound states of heavy quarks are an ideal probe. Being much heavier than the surrounding medium, these heavy quarkonia are both cleanly identifiable in experiment and their in-medium propagation allows for an efficient non-relativistic description based on a Schrödinger equation with an appropriate potential.Here we report on recent progress in extracting this potential non-perturbatively from first principles lattice QCD simulations and the use of such complex valued potentials for the description of the real-time in-medium evolution of heavy quarkonium states within an open-quantum systems framework.