He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University, and his research centers on information retrieval (IR), crowdsourcing, and their intersection. Lease has received early career awards from NSF, IMLS, and DARPA, as well as the Modeling Challenge Award at the 2012 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction. He presented an invited keynote at IJCNLP 2011 and invited talks at Frontiers of Information Science and Technology 2012 and ID360 2013: The Global Forum on Identity. He has presented crowdsourcing tutorials at ACM SIGIR (2011-2012), ACM WSDM (2011), CrowdConf (2011), and SIAM Data Mining (2013). He is co-organizing the 3rd annual Crowdsourcing Track for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), as well as the CrowdScale workshop and shared task at AAAI HCOMP 2013.