Photograph of a Asian man with short brown hair, eye glasses, and an blue shirt, standing in front of buildings and trees.

I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University working with Nils Gehlenborg. I received PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University with the supervision of Jinwook Seo at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

As an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of data visualization, human-computer interaction, and biomedical informatics, I design and develop versatile visualization tools that scale to a wide range of user needs within the biomedical domain. Focusing on genomics, I introduced a novel domain-specific language (DSL) for constructing scalable and interactive genomics data visualization (read Nature’s Technology Feature). It not only empowers domain experts to create custom visualizations and tools that are tailored for their needs, but also enbles scientists to leverage AI techniques given that the formal grammar is machine-interpretable.

I have also been closely collaborating with diverse biomedical experts through my expertise in visualization and biomedical informatics. A collaborative project focused on analyzing and visualizing electronic health records (EHR) data of COVID-19 (4CE Consortium).

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

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

Domain-Specific Language Genomics Data Visualization

TVCG 2022 / TVCG 2023 / TVCG 2023 / Bioinformatics 2023 / VIS 2025 /
AI-Enhanced Visualization Authoring of Genomics Data

VIS Short 2023 / VIS Short 2023 / TVCG 2025 / TVCG 2025 / OSF Preprints 2025 /
Human-Centered 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 / Nature Scientific Reports 2025 / OSF Preprints 2025 /
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of COVID-19

npj Digital Medicine 2020 / Journal of Medical Internet Research 2021 / npj Digital Medicine 2022 / npj Digital Medicine 2022 / Nature Medicine 2023 /
A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers
Sehi L'Yi, Harrison G. Zhang, Andrew P. Mar, Thomas C. Smits, Lawrence Weru, Sofía Rojas, Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg
Nature Scientific Reports (2025) 15, 23676
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) (2025)
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) (2025)
23.2% acceptance rate
AltGosling: Automatic Generation of Text Descriptions for Accessible Genomics Data Visualization
Thomas C Smits, Sehi L'Yi, Andrew Patrick Mar, Nils Gehlenborg
Bioinformatics (2024)
🏆 Runner-Up Abstract Award at ISMB BioVis 2025
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 (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. VIS) (2023) 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. VIS) (2023) 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. VIS) (2022) 28(1), 40-150
25.8% acceptance rate
🏆 ISMB/ECCB BioVis Best Abstract Award