Pedersen was born in Busan, on the coast of south-eastern Korea, to a Norwegian Father Brede Pedersen and a Japanese mother Takino Yasui, in 1904. Due to his father's work as an Engineer, he spent part of his childhood near the Unsan mine in present-day North Korea. He moved to Japan with his family at the age of 8 years to attend a convent school in Nagasaki. When he was 10 years old, he moved to Yokohama and entered an international school, called Saint Joseph College. He came to the United States in 1922 to study chemical engineering at the University of Dayton in Ohio. After receiving a bachelor's degree, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a master's degree in organic chemistry. Although his professors encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, Pedersen decided to start his career instead, partially because he no longer wanted to be supported by his Father. He is one of the few people to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences without having a Ph.D.