My main interests are in black holes, holography, and string theory. In my PhD research at Stanford I focused on aspects of string theory near black holes. Specifically, if a string falls into a black hole, how much does the string stretch out near the horizon? We argued that such nonlocal string effects near the horizon lead to a possible resolution of Hawking's information paradox, where the information can be collected by a late observer by detecting the spreading of the early infalling string.