two senior positions in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), between 2004 and 2007. Lieutenant Colonel Mercedes O. Cubria (1903–1980), a.k.a. La Tía (The Aunt), was the first Cuban-born female officer in the United States Army. She served in the Women's Army Corps during World War II and in the United States Army during the Korean War, and was recalled into service during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1988, she was posthumously inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. Science and technology Among Hispanic Americans who have excelled in science are Luis Walter Álvarez, Nobel Prize–winning physicist of Spanish descent, and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist. They first proposed that an asteroid impact on the Yucatán Peninsula caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Mario J. Molina won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and currently works in the chemistry department at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Victor Manuel Blanco is an astronomer who in 1959 discovered "Blanco 1", a galactic cluster. F. J. Duarte is a laser physicist and author; he received the Engineering Excellence Award from the prestigious Optical Society of America for the invention of the N-slit laser interferometer. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa is the director of the Pituitary Surgery Program at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the director of the Brain Tumor Stem Cell Laboratory at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Physicist Albert Baez made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes and later X-ray telescopes. His nephew John Carlos Baez is also a noted mathematical physicist. Francisco J. Ayala is a biologist and philosopher, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been awarded the National Medal of Science and the Templeton Prize. Peruvian-American biophysicist Carlos Bustamante has been named a Searle Scholar and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. Luis von Ahn is one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing and the founder of the companies reCAPTCHA and Duolingo. Colombian-American Ana Maria Rey received a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in atomic physics in 2013. Dr. Fernando E. Rodríguez Vargas discovered the bacteria that cause dental cavity. Dr. Gualberto Ruaño is a biotechnology pioneer in the field of personalized medicine and the inventor of molecular diagnostic systems, Coupled Amplification and Sequencing (CAS) System, used worldwide for the management of viral diseases. Fermín Tangüis was an agriculturist and scientist who developed the Tangüis Cotton in Peru and saved that nation's cotton industry.