Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist and Senior Research Associate in the Asia and Pacific Health Program at the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney. His global health research draws the insights of ethnography into dialogue with queer theory, transgender studies, and science and technology studies (STS). He has completed several long-term, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive health and rights in Asia and the Pacific. His first book, The Made-Up State: Trans Femininity, Technology, and Citizenship in Indonesia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. It was awarded the 2023 Anne Bolin and Gilbert Herdt Book Prize by the Human Sexuality Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. 

Within the Asia and Pacific Health Program, Benjamin draws on his expertise in Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) to work collaboratively with colleagues in global public health in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. His most recent research is an Australian Human Rights Institute-funded research project, Transgender rights and health in Indonesia: A rapid ethnographic assessment, which investigates access to legal and medical forms of gender affirmation and its impact on health for transgender communities in Indonesia. This research is supported by the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW Sydney and the Center for HIV/AIDS Research at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta, Indonesia.

In 2024-2025 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, funded by a highly competitive French Institutes for Advanced Studies (FIAS) Fellowship, and a Research Affiliate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford to complete research on symbiotic viruses in global health. He serves on the Editorial Board of American Ethnologist, the Editorial Collective of Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania), is Associate Editor for the Gender and Sexuality for the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology and the History of Anthropology Review, and is the Reviews Editor (with Meredith Evans) for Medicine Anthropology Theory.