Photograph of a young Asian man with short brown hair, eyeglasses, an orange shirt, and a hint of a smile.

I’m an NIH K99/R00 postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School. I received PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University with the supervision of Dr. Jinwook Seo at the Human—Computer Interaction Lab.

I’m an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on human-centered biomedical data visualization. My postdoctoral research has focused on building visualization tools to help a broad range of people interact with complex and large-scale biomedical data, including genomics, epigenomics, and electric health records (EHR) data.

My foundational work is Gosling, a grammar-based visualization toolkit for genomics data (see Nature’s Technology Feature), which enables flexible creation of interactive visualizations (online editor). One of its strengths is supporting bidirectional user interactions when embedded in applications. This enabled us to build AI/ML-based interactive visualization tools (VIS, CHI, VIS Short), visual analytics tools for large-scale cancer genomics data (Nature Methods, Bioinformatics), recommendation systems (VIS), and many more.

I have been closely collaborating with diverse biomedical experts. One of my collaborative projects focused on visualizing site-level and patient-level electronic health records (EHR) data of COVID-19 treatment that helped with quality control, hypothesis formalization, and communication (Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR).

Research I led received several major academic awards, including Best Paper Honorable Mention (Top 5%) at IEEE VIS 2024 and Best Abstract Award (Top 1) at ISMB BioVis 2021. Also, I am the recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award.

I am in the job market looking for positions in both academia (tenure-track faculty positions in computer science, informatics, computational biology, and related fields) and industry (research scientist, software engineer, etc). Please reach out to me if you have any questions or opportunities! (sehi_lyi@hms.harvard.edu)

Latest News

Media Coverage

Nature (TECHNOLOGY FEATURE)
A graphics toolkit for visualizing genome data
Powerful 'grammar' allows geneticists to display their data in interactive and scalable illustrations.
"Postdoc Sehi L’Yi, who led Gosling’s development, says that what differentiates Gosling from other visualization tools is its expressiveness. With most tools, he says, the graphics that can be made and what they will look like are predefined. ‘It is really not easy to customize visualizations as a user.’ But with Gosling, users can, for instance, specify the colour, dimensions and placement of the symbol used to represent a centromere or genomic interval, then overlay that on an ideogram of a chromosome to highlight a region of interest."
Image with two heatmap visualizations that look like an eyebrow and an eye.

Research Themes

Grammar-based Genomics Data Visualization

VIS 2021 / VIS 2022 / VIS Short 2022 / Bioinformatics 2023 /
Learnable and Expressive Multimodal User Interactions

VIS Short 2023 / VIS Short 2023 / VIS 2024 / VIS 2024 /
Multiscale Visual Analytics for Cancer Genomics

Nature Methods 2023 / Bioinformatics 2023 / CHI 2023 / Nucleic Acids Research 2024 /
Accessibility of Biomedical Data Resources and Visualizations

Bioinformatics 2024 / OSF Preprints 2024 /
Visualizing Electronic Health Record (EHR) of COVID-19

npj Digital Medicine 2020 / Journal of Medical Internet Research 2021 / npj Digital Medicine 2022 / npj Digital Medicine 2022 / Nature Medicine 2023 /
Learnable and Expressive Visualization Authoring Through Blended Interfaces
Sehi L'Yi, Astrid van den Brandt, Etowah Adams, Huyen N. Nguyen, Nils Gehlenborg
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. VIS) (2024), Accepted
23.2% acceptance rate
🏆 Best Paper Honorable Mention
Understanding Visualization Authoring Techniques for Genomics Data in the Context of Personas and Tasks
Astrid van den Brandt, Sehi L'Yi, Huyen N. Nguyen, Nils Gehlenborg
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. VIS) (2024), Accepted
23.2% acceptance rate
Chromoscope: interactive multiscale visualization for structural variation in human genomes
Sehi L'Yi, Dominika Maziec, Victoria Stevens, Trevor Manz, Alexander Veit, Michele Berselli, Peter J Park, Dominik Głodzik, Nils Gehlenborg
Nature Methods (Correspondence) (2023), 20, 1834–1835
Multi-view Design Patterns and Responsive Visualization for Genomics Data
Sehi L'Yi, Nils Gehlenborg
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. IEEE VIS '22) (2022), 29(1), 559-569
26.5% acceptance rate
GenoREC: A Recommendation System for Interactive Genomics Data Visualization
Aditeya Pandey, Sehi L'Yi, Qianwen Wang, Michelle A Borkin, Nils Gehlenborg
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. IEEE VIS '22) (2022), 29(1), 570-580
26.5% acceptance rate
🏆 IEEE InfoVis Best Poster Award
Gosling: A Grammar-based Toolkit for Scalable and Interactive Genomics Data Visualization
Sehi L'Yi, Qianwen Wang, Fritz Lekschas, Nils Gehlenborg
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. IEEE VIS '21) (2021), 28(1), 40-150
25.8% acceptance rate
🏆 ISMB/ECCB BioVis Best Abstract Award
Comparative Layouts Revisited: Design Space, Guidelines, and Future Directions
Sehi L'Yi, Jaemin Jo, Jinwook Seo
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (Proc. IEEE VIS '20) (2020), 27(2), 1525-1535
25.6% acceptance rate