Lease's research integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques across the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation (HCOMP), information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP). Lease is a faculty founder and leader of UT Austin's Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide "moonshot" Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies. As part of Good Systems, Lease is leading a six-year, seven-member faculty project developing explainable AI techniques to curb disinformation. Lease is the recipient of 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). Recent research awards include Best Student Paper at the 2022 The 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.