Alumni Receive Alumni Honoree Awards
Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Alumni, Felix Friedman ‘95, Will Baumgardner ‘22, and Chloe Parker ‘14 have received Liberal Arts Alumni Honoree Awards from the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, presented at the 2026 Alumni Awards Ceremony.
Felix Friedman, recipient of the Outstanding Alumni Award, is president of Oxygen Partners Corporation, a Chicago-based firm he founded in 2002 that provides consulting services to RPM Access LLC and other energy companies. His work spans wind energy project development, grid interconnection, real estate, financing, construction, and operations. Earlier in his career, Friedman served as vice president of development at Midwest Renewable Energy Corp and as a project development manager at Iberdrola, where he focused on wind energy initiatives in Iowa. His experience reflects more than two decades of leadership in the renewable energy sector.
Will Baumgardner, recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Achievement Award, began his career at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a public policy think tank, where he assisted Dr. Chris Miller in writing the New York Times bestseller Chip War and Dr. Leon Aron in writing Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War. After a year at AEI, Baumgardner joined the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the US Department of Commerce, where he has spent the past three years shaping US export controls and processing export license applications to comprehensively sanctioned countries including Cuba and Iran.
Chloe Parker, recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Achievement Award, began her career in management at McMaster-Carr, a business-to-business e-commerce company in Atlanta. Her interest in the psychology of high-performing teams led her to pursue an MBA from Emory University. After graduating in 2019, she partnered with organizational psychology faculty to develop curricula including “Bias in the Workplace” and “The Science of Well-Being,” and co-authored a case study published through Northwestern University.
