Alan R. Sandstrom worked in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University in Fort Wayne, and was Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and a sociocultural anthropologist.  His interests are in cultural ecology, cultural materialism, economic anthropology, history and theory of anthropology, Native peoples of Mesoamerica and North America, and religion, ritual, and symbolism. He conducted an ethnographic field research among Tibetans in exile in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, and worked for more than four decades among Nahuatl speakers of northern Veracruz, Mexico.  He was an editor of the Nahua Newsletter, an international publication covering the history, language, and culture of Nahuatl-speaking and related peoples in the Mesoamerica culture area and President of the Central States Anthropological Society from 2000 to 2001. The Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico selected Alan R. Sandstrom as the Distinguished Professor. He has been awarded a number of grants including a Research Fulbright, an American Council of Learned Societies research fellowship, and a research grant from the American Philosophical Society. Alan R. Sandstrom retired in 2009 after 34 years at IPFW. Pamela Effrein Sandstrom received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University in 1975, a Master of library science degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1981 and a Doctor of Philosophy in library and information science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1998. She trained as an academic librarian and information social scientist, and joined Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) Helmke Library in 1976 as a Serials Assistant, and has had various library jobs throughout her career and is now Associate Librarian Emerita at Purdue University in Fort Wayne after retiring from Perdu in 2011. Alan Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom co-wrote “Traditional Papermaking and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico”, and “Corn is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village”.

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