Pedersen received his M.Sc. (Cand. Scient.) in Computer Science with a minor in Maths from the University of Aarhus in Denmark in 1997. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada in 2003, and has since then been a professor (currently associate) at UNLV. His dissertation focused on debugging parallel message-passing programs; he teaches compiler construction and programming languages along with a number of graduate courses in concurrent and parallel programming. His research interests include compiler constructions, languages, formal verification, debugging, and concurrent/parallel computing.

He recently authored the book “Practical Compiler Construction using Java and the JVM”, which is also used at UNLV.