Since January 2026, Nihat Ay is a member of the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub.

As an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute he is involved in research on complexity theory. He is also affiliated with the Leipzig University as an honorary professor for information geometry. Nihat Ay has co-authored a comprehensive mathematics book and written numerous articles on this subject. Furthermore, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Information Geometry. In April 2021, he joined the Hamburg University of Technology as a professor and the head of the newly founded institute for Data Science Foundations.

Nihat Ay studied mathematics and physics at the Ruhr University Bochum and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Leipzig University in 2001. In 2003 and 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley). From 2005 to 2021, he worked as a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig where he was heading the group Information Theory of Cognitive Systems.