The structure of hadrons is incredibly rich and complex, despite the proton being one of the most familiar building blocks of matter. It is of great interest to characterize hadronic bound states in terms of their constituent quark and gluon degrees of freedom, such as spin, momentum, position, and flavor. Similarly, it is of great interest to understand how hadronic bound states form during the evolution of high energy collisions in scattering processes involving outgoing quarks or gluons. Both are central questions in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that the Aidala group is investigating with a number of unique datasets from PHENIX at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), and LHCb at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). RHIC is the world's only polarized proton collider, allowing for a wealth of unique spin-spin and spin-momentum correlation measurements between protons and their constituents, while LHCb is a forward spectrometer with excellent beauty-quark tagging and particle identification capabilities, making it ideal for measurements elucidating hadron formation mechanisms. In addition, the sPHENIX experiment at RHIC, as well as the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), offer a very promising future for answering these fundamental questions. In this talk, I will provide some background on these open questions in QCD and discuss various measurements from the Aidala research group with an emphasis on how they improve our understanding.