So none of those solutions worked but I did find something that did. I used the following code and was able to get the image to finally show up.
<?php
$publisher_photo = get_the_author_meta('user_profile_image');
$image_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src($publisher_photo);
echo '<img class="avatar" src="'. $image_src[0] .'" />';
?>
Thank you for your help with this.