Raw (unlinked) ouput of $name variable
The entire node object is available as $node so you should be able to do something like:

$author=user_load($node-&gt;uid);
print check_plain($author-&gt;name); // reasonably safe given the 'Spaces are allowed; punctuation is not allowed except for periods, hyphens, apostrophes, and underscores.' validation upon registration but let's check_plain() it anyway


or 

$author=user_load($node-&gt;uid);
print check_plain(format_username($author));


if you have modules installed that modify the display of the user name.