Identity. The word itself has many meanings depending on who you ask. In some ways, our entire life is wrapped up in how we identify, who we identify as, and how others identify us. When I first set out to write outside of my research interests, I had, in some ways, a crisis of identity. I felt as if I had stepped outside of who I was — and I wasn't sure whether the identity that was emerging could coexist with the one I had already built.
So I made a decision. Before I wrote a single word for public consumption, I created a name — a container for this other kind of thinking. I called him Ronin Volf. The choice was deliberate: a ronin is a samurai without a master, someone who operates outside an established order, on their own terms. That felt right for writing that didn't fit neatly inside the boundaries of my professional world. Volf was the voice I needed in order to say things I wasn't yet sure I was allowed to say as myself.
Looking back, I can see what I was really doing. I wasn't hiding. I was giving myself permission.
The pen name worked — but only up to a point. The books exist. The ideas are out there. And yet something has always been missing: a real person attached to them. Someone a reader can look up, push back on, or trust. A name without a face behind it can only travel so far.
So here is the person behind Mr. Volf. I'm Bradley Trager — a prevention scientist with a PhD in Biobehavioral Health who spends his professional life developing programs aimed at improving how people live and feel. But long before any of that, I was someone who couldn't stop asking the kinds of questions that don't have clean answers: What does it mean to be human? How do we shape the world around us — and how does it shape us back? Those questions never fit neatly into a research paper. Ronin Volf was where they went instead. He is me — and has always been me.
What I didn't anticipate was that the pen name would become its own kind of trap. Not a bad one — it gave me something real. But it put me in a box with no exit. I could write, but I couldn't show up. I could publish ideas, but I couldn't have a conversation about them. And the conversation, I've come to realize, is the whole point. The books I've written — about authorship, about how researchers communicate, about what AI is doing to both — are ideas that need to be argued over, challenged, built on. They don't work as monologues delivered from behind a mask.
Revealing myself isn't really about the books, though I hope you'll read them. It's about being willing to stand in the room. To say: these are my ideas, this is my name, and I'm genuinely interested in what you think. If any of what I've written has landed with you — or frustrated you, or made you want to push back — I'd like to hear it. That's the conversation I was trying to have all along. I just needed to show up for it first.
— Brad