$Profile not available ito author pane

It seems that the $profile variable from the Content Profile module is not available in /modules/advanced_profile/theme/advanced_profile_author-pane.tpl.php for whatever reason. (I'm not sure why). When I print it out from the template, it is blank. To work around this, I created a custom module with a hook pre-process function for author pane as follows:

/**
* Implementation of hook_preprocess_author_pane().
*/
function custom_preprocess_author_pane(&$variables) {

  if (module_exists('content_profile')) {
        $variables['content_profile'] = new content_profile_theme_variables($variables['account']->uid);
  }
}

and then in /modules/advanced_profile/theme/advanced_profile_author-pane.tpl, I access my profile variables by doing the following:

$profile = $content_profile->get_variables('profile');

I'm not sure if there is a better way of doing this, so hoping this will help someone.