Kenneth Livingston was born in 1914 in Pendleton, Oregon. He attended Stanford University and obtained his BA in 1936. His medical student days were spent at Harvard where he graduated MD in 1939.

His neurosurgical education began in 1942 at Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, N.Y.; then, after two years at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, he was appointed to the Attending Staff at the Lahey Clinic in Boston from 1946-1948. He returned to Oregon as Assistant Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Oregon Medical School in 1948.