Lee Drake
National Council Chair

Lee Drake is currently a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in Archaeology and has recently received his Masters of Science. Born in Chicago and raised in the country along the Wyoming-Montana border, he began is career in politics in the '04 election cycle at the University of Wyoming. He served in 2006-2007 as the Northwestern Regional Director, then in 2008 as the Southwestern Regional Director. Most recently Lee Drake has served as CDA's National Council Vice-Chair.

As Northwestern Regional Director, Lee helped bring Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota closer in to College Democrats, and helped constitutional partnerships between YDA and CDA in Minnesota, Utah, and Wyoming. As Southwestern Regional Director Lee worked closely with Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona as they re-built their CDA systems and re-established partnerships with Young Democrats of America. He also saw through the development of state plans, precinct data, and membership lists across both the Southwest and continental US. As National Council Vice-Chair Lee created the CDA Wire and also oversaw the Constitutional Committee.

In addition to College Democrats of America, Lee researches using macrobotanical remains to re-construct local climate curves for archaeological sites and explores evolutionary relationships between animal domestication and agriculture in Polynesia. He has worked in Peru, Hawai'i, and Israel, the latter of which was within the bombing zone by Hezbollah in 2006. As a teenager, Lee excavated dinosaurs at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, culminating in the discovery of a collection of Allosaurs, a large predator that lived in the late Jurassic period.