Herbst is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University's Historical Seminar and Institute of Eastern and Southeastern European History. She is currently finalizing her dissertation project on the flight of Polish Jews to Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Her research focuses on the Holocaust in Ukraine, Jewish experiences of flight and displacement during the Second World War, the Holocaust, and its aftermath.

Herbst's professional work includes academic research, education, and fieldwork for which she received scholarships and awards from various institutions, including the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem and the Center for Urban History. She is currently finalizing her dissertation project under the Claims Conference’s Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies. Her most recent publications from De Gruyter and Academic Press include articles on experiences of flight and Jewish families during the Holocaust. In the past ten years, she has provided her expertise to memorial and research institutions across Germany and Ukraine. Between 2017 and 2022, she conducted research for the German Foreign Ministry’s memorial project, Protecting Memory, which identified, marked, and documented over 15 sites of mass graves across present-day Ukraine.

In her dissertation Herbst traces the trajectories of Polish Jews who escaped the General Gouvernemnt by assuming non-Jewish identities and infiltrating the ranks of construction companies in occupied Ukraine where they sought to survive the Holocaust. The study sheds a light on a group of Jews who escaped from Lwów (today: Lviv) to the Reich Commissariat Ukraine and eastern Ukrainian territories under the Wehrmacht administration from which they crossed the borders to Romania. 

During her residency at the Center of Urban History, she will revise and edit her study while conducting field research in different sites in Lviv pertaining to the Holocaust in Lwów and the everyday lives of Jews in the Lemberg ghetto and Janowska camp.