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 working with Dr. Nils Gehlenborg at the Department of Biomedical Informatics of Harvard Medical School. I am also a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee member at the Department of Biomedical Informatics and an Accessibility Ambassador at Harvard University through the Whole Me Campaign. I received PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University, where I focused on visualization for bioinformatics data and user-centered design under the supervision of Dr. Jinwook Seo at the HCI Lab.

As a researcher working at the intersection of human–computer interaction, visualization, and biomedical informatics, I build visualization tools to help a broad range of people interact with complex and large-scale genomics data. In the HIDIVE lab, I have been focusing on the Gosling grammar-based visualization. Gosling’s strengths to enable flexible creation of interactive, expressive, and scalable genome-mapped visualizations was featured by Nature. Gosling has been widely adopted in academia and industry and used as a platform in many of my follow-up studies, such as Blace (VIS 24), Design Probes (VIS 24), AltGosling (Bioinformatics 24), Chromoscope (Nature Methods, 23), Cistrome Explorer (Bioinformatics, 23), DRAVA (CHI 23), Gos (Bioinformatics, 23), Responsive Design (VIS 22), and GenoREC (VIS 22).

I have also been contributing to large consortia projects and data portals in EHR and computational genomics, including Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR (4CE), Cistrome Data Browser, and cBioPortal, by designing and integrating interactive data visualizations.

Research I led as the first author received several 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, which will support my research up to $249,000 annually for the first three years as an Assistant Professor.

I am in the job market starting this year (2024-2025 cycle) looking for tenure-track faculty positions in Computer Science, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and related fields. 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.
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