How to fix Google SEO issue of "Reference to nonexistent item" in Hugo academic Blogdown website

I've created a website with Blogdown, using the Hugo Academic theme and Netlify to deploy (with an domain), and realized that it is not appearing in Google searches. When Google crawled the site, it returned an "Unparsable structured data issue", and looking at the issue, it says that

<div class="row" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="" itemref="person-email">
  <div class="col-12 col-lg-4">
    <div id="profile">

results in The 'itemref' attribute points to a nonexistent identifier person-email.

I'm assuming this is coming from something in the theme, but I have added my email to the index page that looks like it is causing the issue, and that didn't fix the error.

If anyone has any suggestions, that'd be much appreciated, as an unfindable website is pretty useless.