Compliance-first Python automation for university research grant tracking, lab inventory, hazardous-material compliance, budget reconciliation, and audit-ready reporting.
Research Grant Automation is a practical engineering handbook for the people who keep university research operations defensible: sponsored-programs administrators, research compliance officers, Python automation developers, and laboratory managers.
Every guide treats regulatory compliance as executable infrastructure rather than paperwork. Instead of reconstructing intent in a spreadsheet the night before an audit, you build deterministic, idempotent pipelines that enforce policy at the point of entry, fingerprint every record, and write to an immutable, re-hashable audit ledger. The result is automation an auditor can trust three years later — because the same inputs always recompute to the same number.
The patterns are grounded in the rules that actually govern the work: the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200), the NIH Grants Policy Statement, the NSF PAPPG, the OSHA Laboratory Standard (29 CFR 1910.1450), and the EPA RCRA generator standards (40 CFR 262). Every code example is production-grade Python 3.10+ with type hints, Pydantic validation, and idempotent SQLAlchemy upserts.
| Area | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Automated Ingestion & Data Sync Workflows | Audit-ready pipelines for polling grant portals, parsing complex spreadsheets, validating schemas, capturing incremental changes, and queuing high-volume inventory updates without data loss. |
| Core Architecture & Policy Mapping | Translating federal and institutional mandates into machine-readable rules, hardening security boundaries, and designing resilient fallback routing across the grant lifecycle. |
| Equipment Calibration & Lab Inventory Tracking | Calibration due-date routing, high-frequency instrument usage logging, preventive-maintenance scheduling, dynamic reorder thresholds, and multi-building asset mapping. |
| Compliance Reporting & Budget Reconciliation | Tamper-evident PDF and CSV audit reports, F&A indirect-cost recovery reconciliation, cost-transfer anomaly detection, and effort certification with an immutable sign-off trail. |
| Hazardous Material & Chemical Inventory Compliance | OSHA 29 CFR 1910.1450 chemical-hygiene checks, EPA RCRA hazardous-waste accumulation tracking, biennial reporting, and structured safety-data-sheet records. |
- Deterministic and idempotent by default — re-running a pipeline never double-posts an expenditure, duplicates a safety inspection, or overwrites a verified compliance flag.
- Policy as version-controlled configuration — regulatory rules are compiled into the pipeline and evaluated at runtime, with a full audit trail and zero-downtime rule changes.
- Immutable audit trails — every decision lands in an append-only, hash-chained ledger that an auditor can independently reconstruct and verify.
- Copy-ready Python — each guide ships runnable code, field-mapping tables, decision matrices, and troubleshooting playbooks you can adapt to your institution.
This repository holds the full source of the www.research-grant.org
website — a fast, accessible static site built with Eleventy and deployed on
Cloudflare. Content lives in content/, templates and styles in src/.
npm install # install dependencies
npm run build # build the static site into _site/
npm run serve # local dev server with live reloadSpotted an error in a compliance interpretation, or have a workflow you'd like to see covered? Open an issue — corrections and suggestions from research-administration and lab-operations practitioners are very welcome.