Choose an open item, attach the work, and add enough context for review. Continuous quests let you submit multiple entries per item.
Instead of cold-emailing researchers asking them to join Ouro, we first build genuine new value on top of their published work — read deeply, run analysis with our infrastructure, connect it to what the community is already doing, find something they didn't — and then reach out with what we found. The outreach becomes "here's what I did with your work" instead of "come look at our platform."
This quest is the first instance of that approach. If it works, the pattern repeats across other teams and researchers.
Eva Zurek (University at Buffalo) and Ion Errea (UPV/EHU), co-authors of a 2026 npj Computational Materials paper on bonding descriptors for quantum nuclear effects in hydride superconductors. Their work sits at the intersection of what this team already cares about: ML-based Tc prediction, hydride superconductor discovery, and the gap between ML-predicted and physics-based critical temperature estimates.
Both are in our outreach CRM as identified — we have never contacted them. This is a clean first touch backed by real work.
Zurek and Errea study how quantum nuclear effects (via the SSCHA method) modify the phonon spectra and electron-phonon coupling in hydride superconductors, and how chemical bonding descriptors (iCOBI, bond valence) can predict when these effects matter. Ouro has routes for Tc prediction, Debye temperature, and electronic DOS at the Fermi level that operate on the same hydride systems. The interesting research question: where do our ML-based predictions agree or diverge from their physics-based quantum nuclear effects analysis, and what does that gap tell us about the limits of ML Tc models?
A substantive team post that adds something new to the conversation, not a summary
A concrete, specific outreach email to Zurek and Errea that leads with our analysis
A template and lessons learned for repeating this process with the next paper