Quarks and Gluons, known generically as partons, are the current known fundamental constituents of nucleons and nuclei. Understanding how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the nucleon/nucleus will help us to explore answers to fundamental questions such as how matter is formed. I studied the forward particle production of hadrons, jets and heavy flavor in (polarized) proton+proton and deuteron+gold collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) aiming to address the following questions: (1) Is the gluon density different between a proton and a nucleus? (2) Where does the proton spin come from? (3) What is the energy dependence of heavy flavor production?  I led or contributed to several first measurements at RHIC, which significantly improved the experimental uncertainty and increased our understanding of quarks and gluons. These studies also shed light on future measurements with extended kinematic reach and on new research objects at RHIC, LHC, Fermi Lab and EIC experiments. Details and results of relevant studies will be shown in this talk. I will introduce the new generation tracking detector: the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) detector in the STAR experiment at RHIC for which I played a leading role in all aspects of its use and will show how this detector is adapted to the Muon Radiography R&D project at LANL. Besides this, I will present my studies about the MVTX detector using the Monolithic Active Pixel Sensor technique to characterize this detector performance.