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

I’m an incoming Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, starting Fall 2026. I’m currently a NIH K99/R00 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, working with Nils Gehlenborg. I received my 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, I work at the intersection of visualization, human–AI interaction, and biomedical informatics. I have designed and developed interactive data systems that scale to a wide range of user needs within biomedical domains. For example, the Gosling visualization grammar enables constructing scalable and interactive genomics data visualization and leveraging AI methods (read Nature’s Technology Feature).

Research I led received several notable academic awards, including NIH/NHGRI K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award ($747,000), Best Paper Honorable Mention (Top 5%) at IEEE VIS 2024, and Best Abstract Award (Top 1) at ISMB BioVis 2021.

I'm currently looking to recruit PhD students at HKUST. For details, please read the Work With Me page.

News

SERVICE Jan 20, 2026
Program Committee @ VIS 2026
Sehi is serving on the program committee for full papers at IEEE VIS 2026.
PAPER Jan 16, 2026
Visualization Design Knowledge Bases @ CHI 2026
A paper on formalized visualization design knowledge bases was accepted at CHI 2026.
SERVICE Oct 27, 2025
Program Committee @ PacificVis 2026 & EuroVis 2026
Sehi is serving on program committees for PacificVis 2026 and EuroVis 2026.
PAPER Oct 27, 2025
Data Accessibility Guidelines @ PLoS Comput. Biol.
Sehi's senior author paper on ten-simple rules for data accessibility was accepted at PLoS Computational Biology.

Selected Projects

Selected Publications [see more]

Hyeok Kim, Sehi L'Yi, Nils Gehlenborg, Jeffrey Heer
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26) (2026)
25.3% acceptance rate
Sehi L'Yi, Harrison G. Zhang, Andrew P. Mar, Thomas C. Smits, Lawrence Weru, Sofía Rojas, Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg
Scientific Reports (2025) 15, 23676
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
Thomas C Smits**, Sehi L'Yi, Andrew Patrick Mar, Nils Gehlenborg
Bioinformatics (2024)
Runner-Up Abstract Award at ISMB BioVis 2025
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
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 Research Award
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

Media Coverage

Nature (TECHNOLOGY FEATURE)
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.