His contribution to stratigraphic classification of rocks and procedures is a monumental work which received universal acceptance.

The firm he worked for, the Gulf Oil Corporation in Venezuela, trusted his findings and explored what had until then been uncharted territory.

His college study was interrupted when his father died in 1921 forcing him to return home to run the farm.

He resumed his studies in 1922 and in 1925 completed his BA degree in geology with a distinction as a Phi Beta Kappa key.

In 1926, he contributed a technical paper on "The Effect of Gravitational Compaction on the Structure of Sedimentary Rocks" based on his investigations at the University of Kansas.

He put forward a theory that porosity in shales was an index of pressure metamorphism liable to indicate the presence of oil, years before the approach was documented in the literature.

Based on his field investigations during this period he propounded the theory that correlation and dating of rocks could be undertaken without the help of fossils which he documented in a paper titled "Some Aspects of Sedimentary Petrography in Relation to Stratigraphy in the Bolivar Coast Fields of the Maracaibo Basin, Venezuela" (1928)".

He then decided to join the geological laboratory of the Venezuelan Gulf Oil Company in Maracaibo as a stratigrapher.

[2] In spite of frequent health problems, he undertook extensive field trips and published papers propounding many new theories on the stratigraphy of geological sections in different regions of Venezuela.

A particular find described in a paper titled "Cretaceous Limestones as Petroleum Source Rock in Northwestern Venezuela" (1931) was of the La Luna Formation of Cenomanian/Turonian Age, concluding that Luna Formation was a major source of the petroleum embedded in tertiary sediments in the Lake Maracaibo area.

One of them, Innocensio, a worker who was helping him in his field work in Perija Mountains was eager to learn to read and write, practicing under a tree at night.

He appointed him as assistant in the laboratory at Maracaibo where Innocensio eventually turned out to be one of Gulf Oil's best technicians.

[2] In his professional career, he was promoted in December 1939 as Assistant Chief Geologist and posted to Gulf's San Tomé camp in eastern Venezuela.

During the Reagan administration, he prepared a well-researched paper "National-International Jurisdictional Boundary on the Ocean Floor".

In the third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference, he opposed the move to limit the jurisdiction of a country to an arbitrary 200 nautical miles limit as it would cause 250,000 square mile jurisdictional loss of territory to the US for deep water exploration.

[2] Between 1959 and 1972, Hedberg worked as a professor in the Princeton University and lectured graduate students on "Stratigraphic Systems".

Hedberg married Frances Murray and they had five children: they had four sons: Ronald, James, William, and Franklin Augustin, and one daughter: Mary.