odi Barth is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut [UConn], where he is teaching the Universitiy's first On-line Journalism courses.

Before coming to UConn in the fall of 2006, he taught journalism at the United States International University- Nairobi [USIU] where he is now on leave of absence, wrote a weekly column on media and politics in Kenya's Sunday Standard, and appeared on national television as media expert.

Kodi is a Master of Science graduate of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, New York, where he studied critical issues in journalism under the celebrated late Professor James W. Carey, founder of the PhD program at Columbia J-school.

Kodi -- everybody, even his students, call him just that -- is a trained public speaker. Among his latest speaking engagements was mid March at the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico, where as a guest of the Norwegian Water Directorate he chaired a panel debate featuring scientists, politicians and journalists on how these crucial sectors can best cooperate to manage global water disasters.

His journalism experience spans 11 years. He has been deputy editor of a Kenyan religious monthly, where he still writes a column; an international correspondent with Catholic News Service in Washington, DC; and a city reporter in New York. He has also reported from Fribourg inSwitzerland, Moscow and Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan.

When in Nairobi, he is a frequent resource person of the US Embassy, informally advising resident and visiting State Department officials on the media landscape in the East-African region. He coordinateed in fall 2004 a public lecture featuring Wellesley College Professor Alan Schechter, Chairman Emeritus of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton. Being a resource person for the US and Norwegian officials is Kodi's lifeline to the diplomatic world, and self-education on political sensitivities of intergovernmental processes.

PHOTO: by a naughty student who sneaked up on us (March 3, 2006) Who is boss here? Kodi (R), leads a jeans-weekend team of student journalists to plan the USIU Spring 2006 Gazette. See how it came out

In academia, Kodi is Kenya's pioneer On-line Journalism lecturer, now about to be the founder of the same at UConn. His works in New Media are published by Columbia University. He has been quoted in the UK-based dotJournalism and Online Journalism Review, a publication of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Enneagram, a Popular Approach to Personality, published by The Seed, the Kenyan Catholic monthly, and is the English editor of Media Training in Africa, the Art of Publishing a Newspaper.

Besides journalism, Kodi has undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Sacred Theology from Universitas Ponficia Urbaniana, Rome; and a B.A. in Religion from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa.

He is fluent in English, Kiswahili, Dholuo; and profeicient in Italian. Now he's on to a new fetish -- margical French.