Joshua Pelleg received his B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, M.Sc. in Metallurgy at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, and Ph.D. in Metallurgy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. He has been in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) Materials Engineering Department in Beer-Sheva, Israel, since 1970, and was among the founders of the department, and served as its second chairman.

He was the recipient of the Samuel Ayrton Chair in Metallurgy. He specializes in the mechanical properties of materials and the diffusion and defects in solids. He has chaired several university committees and served four terms as the chairman of Advanced Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Prior to his work at BGU, he acted as the assistant professor and then associate professor in the Department of Materials and Metallurgy at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. He was also a visiting professor in the Department of Metallurgy at Iowa State University; at the Institute for Atomic Research, US Atomic Energy Commission, Ames, IA; at McGill University, Montreal, QC; at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Applied Electronics Department, Yokohama, Japan; and in Curtin University, Department of Physics, Perth, Australia. His non-academic research and industrial experience includes the chief metallurgist in Urban Metallurgical Works Ltd., Netanya, Israel; research engineer in International Harvester Manufacturing Research, Chicago, IL; associate research officer for the National Research Council of Canada, Structures and Materials, National Aeronautical Establishment, Ottawa, ON; physics senior research scientist, Nuclear Research Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel; Materials Science Division, Argonne National Labs, Argonne, IL; Atomic Energy of Canada, Chalk River, ON; visiting scientist, CSIR, National Accelerator Centre, Van de Graaf Group Faure, South Africa; Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ; and GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA. His current research interests are mechanical properties, diffusion in solids, thin-film deposition and properties (mostly by sputtering) and the characterization of films, among them various silicides.

His research activity is summarized in his publications in various scientific journals and in ten books published by Springer and Elsevier.