Kayla Chanel Hightower is a Research Affiliate with the Yale Consumer Health Informatics Lab (CHIL) and a PhD student in Social Psychology at Howard University. She earned her BS in Psychology and MS in Psychometrics from Morgan State University where her thesis, The Moderated Relationship of Self-Monitoring and Mental Rotation in Predicting Advanced NBA Performance, examined how cognitive abilities forecast NBA outcomes. Using advanced offensive and defensive performance metrics alongside criterion-related validity testing and ordinary least squares regression models, she investigated how pre-draft mental abilities predict rookie success in the NBA.At CHIL, she contributed as a 2025 Summer Intern to the WellSis project, helping adapt app features to be culturally responsive for Black women. She is also working on the IMHOTEP project, which involves analyzing mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through social network analysis of Twitter data. Her career goal is to become a sports psychologist, exploring how social factors such as trauma, parental loss, and adversity influence athlete performance, while developing culturally responsive assessments.

Former track and field athlete who is building Sport of Mind, a brand dedicated to mental health awareness in sports.