Lease is a researcher who combines artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques in the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation (HCOMP), information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP). He is also a faculty founder and leader of UT Austin's Good Systems, which is an eight-year, university-wide "moonshot" Grand Challenge aimed at designing responsible AI technologies. As part of Good Systems, Lease leads a six-year, seven-member faculty project that focuses on developing explainable AI techniques to combat disinformation.

One of Lease's ongoing projects is content moderation, which involves using automated, human-in-the-loop, and human-safe practices to curb disinformation, hate speech, and polarization online.

Lease has received three Early Career awards: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). He has also won several research awards, including Best Student Paper at the 2022 Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR), and Best Paper at the 2016 AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) conference. Lease holds degrees in Computer Science from Brown University (PhD, MSc) and the University of Washington (BSc).