Nahum Sonenberg (born December 29, 1946) is an Israeli Canadian microbiologist and biochemist. He is a James McGill professor of biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.He was an HHMI international research scholar from 1997 to 2011 and is now a senior international research scholar.He is best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of translation, and notable for the discovery of the mRNA 5' cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus.He received Rosenstiel Award in 2011 for his transformative studies of the control of protein synthesis in mammalian cells.