Mary Ann Deignan and Andrew Tryon Whittaker joined Lazard’s Financial Advisory business as managing directors.

Deignan joined Lazard’s Corporate Preparedness group as a managing director advising clients on shareholder activism, corporate governance trends and the changing profile of their public shareholders. Whittaker joined the group as a managing director focusing on quantitative merger and acquisitions analyses and shareholder data analytics.

“Mary Ann Deignan is one of the most knowledgeable equity capital markets professionals on Wall Street, with investor relationships developed over 25 years,” said Jim Rossman, managing director, head of Corporate Preparedness at Lazard. “Andrew Tryon Whittaker has unrivaled expertise in research and analytics on merger arbitrage, special situations and equity derivatives.”

Deignan joins from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where she was co-head of Global Equity Capital Markets since 2014. Previously she was head of Americas Equity Capital Markets. She served as head of Americas Equity Capital Markets from 2007 to 2011. Between 1993 and 2004 she worked for Merrill Lynch in Equity Capital Markets. She began her investment banking career at Bankers Trust in Los Angeles, working in leveraged finance.

Whittaker joins from M81 Capital, a merger and event arbitrage hedge fund he founded in 2013. He has been a buy-side analyst and portfolio manager for most of the last 10 years, at Timber Hill from 2009 to 2013 and at Goldman Sachs Asset Management from 2007 to 2009. He began his career as an equity analyst and served as Global Head of Arbitrage Research for Lehman Brothers between 1999 and 2006, where he was a top-ranked analyst in equity derivatives research.