Caroline Agsten ’22 is leading Microsoft’s push for “information integrity”

Caroline Agsten graduated from the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs able to deal with uncertainty and “the fluency to ask the right types of questions” — skills she’s putting to the test with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.

As digital threats have grown more prominent and consequential in recent years, the importance of detection and response has taken on a new urgency. Caroline Agsten ’22 is part of an effort at Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center to better understand and respond to an ever-changing landscape of foreign and domestic digital threats.

“We’re researching and detecting and assessing influence activity, propaganda activity, digital threats by nation state actors — Russia, Iran, and China,” said Agsten. “Every day is just so different. One day, you could be looking at Chinese social media; the next day, you’re looking through military procurement documents.”

Agsten’s role as a team lead at Microsoft is both analytical and deeply consequential, demanding a level of flexibility suited to an unpredictable threat environment. She described the two major dimensions of threat analysis as “hack” and “leak” detection — while one side focuses on identifying the individual or group behind a cyberattack, the other, in which she specializes, “centers on researching the leak itself, the component designed to carry influence.”

In describing her work, Agsten underscored just how varied the role can be and how high the stakes are. Democracy protection and the defense of free and fair elections are central priorities for her team, making 2024 and 2025 some of her busiest years to date due to the sheer volume of global elections. Central to Agsten and her team, she said, is “being able to contribute to that work and helping with democratic resilience and integrity in the face of these really important challenges for democracy.”

For all the breadth of her role, there are clear threads that tie it together. “The thing that unites all of us is we all have some sort of area studies or linguistic background or experience living in the host country that we’re focused on or living abroad,” Agsten said.

“We know that we’re trying to do work that will help increase information integrity and resilience, and knowing that it helps people makes the mission feel really important.”

The international and interdisciplinary foundation Agsten built early in her career remains central to the work she does today. She began that path at Middlebury College, where she earned a BA in international and global studies with a specialization in East Asian studies — “I studied Mandarin all four years, I lived in the Chinese house, I did Chinese language tables,” she recalled. That depth of commitment led naturally to a Fulbright in Taiwan upon graduation, after which Agsten spent two years in the U.S. State Department, learning how to prepare foreign affairs professionals for an increasingly global and interconnected workforce.

Even so, Agsten felt pulled back toward area and policy studies, an impulse that drew her to Yale Jackson. She expanded her focus beyond China alone, pursuing a wider understanding of U.S.-China relations, the role of information in society, and the growing influence of disinformation. She described that widening of perspective as one of the most meaningful parts of her time at Yale.

“The classes that I took that were not related to China also ended up being some of the most interesting ones because they allowed me to reflect on how this coexists or complements or complicates perceiving China,” Agsten said.

Mentorship was also a cornerstone of Agsten’s time at Yale. She described Schmidt Program director Ted Wittenstein as both a “mentor and advocate” and lauded senior lecturer Asha Rangappa, whose class on disinformation “opened up thinking about broader ways that information flows through our societies and how that can be affected by culture and psychology.” Beyond the classroom, her work with the Yale Journal of International Affairs also gave her the chance to learn from practitioners around the world.

Through Rangappa and the Yale Jackson School’s Career Development Office, Agsten was connected to an opportunity at the startup Miburo, which was acquired by Microsoft only two weeks after she began. She said the sudden transition to her current role felt manageable because of the foundation Jackson had given her. She said was well equipped with “the fluency to ask the right types of questions” and to think about “what’s in the realm of possibility,” even in a new and uncertain role.

It may seem difficult to draw a single line through her career thus far, but Agsten’s trajectory is more coherent than it first appears. It has been shaped by a habit of following questions that refuse to remain confined to one discipline and by a deep commitment to protecting information integrity in an increasingly complex world.

Reflecting on what sustains her in such a high-pressure role and unpredictable role, Agsten returned to the importance of mission. “We know that we’re trying to do work that will help increase information integrity and resilience,” she said. “And knowing that it helps people makes the mission feel really important.”